Patent Document ID: 20130010608
Application ID: 13618269
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for determining states in a flow of transmitted packets, comprising: receiving the flow of transmitted packets, where each transmitted packet has a monotonically increasing integer sequence number; wherein a next expected sequence number is equal to a largest previous sequence number of a previous packet received incremented by 1 and the next expected sequence number is in a monotonically increasing series with non-reversing values; for a predefined number of consecutively received packets, when a difference between a sequence number of an arriving packet and the next expected sequence number is equal to zero and when a time to live number of the arriving packet is equal to a time to live number of the previous packet, determining that there is a stable state for the predefined number of consecutively received packets; for each received packet, when it is determined that the sequence number of the arriving packet is greater than a calculated next expected sequence number by more than 1, determining that a not stable state exists; and determining a number of holes by a computer, wherein each of the holes is a time between an end of one stable state and a start of a next stable state.