Patent Document ID: 9444714
Application ID: 14454618
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method comprising: collecting, by one or more computing devices, respective observations of end-end bandwidth experienced on different occasions by multiple past communications occurring over different respective observed paths over a network, each path comprising a respective plurality of network components; modelling, by the one or more computing devices, each of the respective network components with a bandwidth probability function characterized by one or more parameters; estimating, by the one or more computing devices, a component bandwidth or component bandwidth probability density for each of the network components based on said modelling, by determining respective values for said parameters to cause a combination of the component bandwidths or bandwidth probability densities for the network components in the observed paths to approximately match, according to an optimization process, the observations of the end-to-end bandwidth experienced by the past communications over the observed paths; predicting, by the one or more computing devices, an end-to-end bandwidth or end-to-end bandwidth probability density of a target path over said network, based on the component bandwidths or bandwidth probability densities of a plurality of constituent ones of said network components, the target path not being included amongst the observed paths; and providing, by the one or more computing devices, the predicted end-to-end bandwidth or bandwidth probability density of the target path to a user terminal, for use as a prediction of a bandwidth or bandwidth probability density for a subsequent communication conducted by the user terminal over the target path.