The behaviour of the routers' buffer may affect the Quality of Service (QoS) of network services under certain conditions, since it may modify some traffic characteristics, as delay or jitter, and may also drop packets. As a consequence, the characterization of the buffer is interesting, especially when multimedia flows are transmitted and even more if they transport information with real-time requirements. This work presents a packet loss analysis with the aim of determining the technical and

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... unctional characteristics of the real buffers (as, e.g., behaviour, size, limits, input and output rate) of a network path. An improved methodology is considered in which two different buffers are concatenated. It permits the estimation of some parameters of the intermediate buffers (size, input and output rate) in a network path including different devices across the Internet. The method presented in this paper permits the characterization of commercial router buffer by means of the analysis of the dropped packets in the buffer.