A method is described for measuring the jitter experienced by an application's
network traffic. The measurement is based solely on packets sent or received by
the application itself. The method does not alter the application's packets, in
particular, it does not add a timestamp to the packets before they are sent. Instead,
it creates a table that stores unique identifiers of the application's packets
along with the time the packets are sent. On the receiving computer, a similar
table is created that stores the unique packet identifiers along with the time
the packets are received. Records of sent packets are associated with records of
received packets so that the time a packet was sent can be compared to the time
the same packet was received. The resulting data are processed to calculate network
jitter and packet loss ratios.
