A system and method for providing statistics gathering within a packet
network is disclosed. The system comprises a network processor, a traffic
manager, a host processor, and a field programmable gate array. The
network processor adds a header to received multimedia packets and the
traffic manager measures and enforces multimedia flow rates. The host
processor performs multimedia flow quality measurement services on a per
flow basis, wherein the multimedia flow quality measurement services
comprise maintaining current statistics for multimedia flows within the
network processor including aggregate and minimum/maximum statistics for
the multimedia flow. The field programmable gate array (FPGA) copies a
received multimedia packet or a portion of the received multimedia
packet, wherein the copy is utilized by the FPGA to perform statistics
gathering via use of a latency engine, a lost packet calculation engine,
a real-time transport control protocol packet jitter engine and a
real-time transport protocol packet jitter engine.