4.4 Packet-Pair Bandwidth Estimation for MMS

Packet-pair is a technique for estimating the bandwidth of a streaming media connection over the Internet.

To estimate bandwidth, the server sends two or more consecutive packets of highly entropic data, and the client estimates the bandwidth by measuring the difference between the times that it receives the packets. This method is usually reliable; however, if the client traverses a network address translation, firewall, or proxy server, the packet-pair bandwidth measurement might be inaccurate.