Patent Document ID: 7697460
Application ID: 11765242
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method comprising: establishing an evaluation bit budget that is based on a predetermined transmission rate at which a first packet stream is to be transmitted from a first node to a second node; iteratively evaluating signal quality that is associated with each network path P n of N i network paths for each iteration i, from the first node to the second node, N i being an integer greater than one and n being an integer between 1 and N i , wherein the evaluation of at least one path P n involves transmitting bits at an evaluation rate that is based on the evaluation bit budget, and wherein the total number of bits transmitted for all evaluations is based on the evaluation bit budget; after each iteration i of the evaluation, selecting an i th subset of network paths from the N i network paths, wherein the selection is based on the signal quality results from the evaluation of the N i network paths; and transmitting, at the predetermined transmission rate, the first packet stream from the first node to a third node, wherein the third node is in path P s that is selected after the final iteration.