System and method for providing statistics gathering within a packet network

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.