Abstract: A method and apparatus for measuring network path quality in a non-cooperative manner, which involves sending a probe consisting of a plurality of probe data packets to a remote node and receiving a response consisting of at least one response data packet therefrom. Both the probe and response data packets carry application messages and are exchanged according to normal transmission mechanisms, so that the method can void the reliability problem suffered by methods using non-data probes. The response data packets, at the same time, provide sufficient information for obtaining a rich set of data-path quality metrics in an efficient way.