Abstract. The importance of high-performance communication to the success of Grid applications makes it critical to develop communication protocols that can take full advantage of the underlying bandwidth when system conditions permit, can back-off in response to observed (or predicted) contention within the network, and can accurately distinguish between these two situations. Achieving this goal requires the development of classification mechanisms that are both accurate and efficient enough to execute in real time. In this paper, we discuss one such classifier that is based on the analysis of the patterns of packet loss and the application of Bayesian statistics. We describe two different analysis techniques that we apply to such patterns, one based on complexity theory and one based on a simple measure of the distance between successive packet losses. In addition, we discuss the integration of the classification mechanism into the control structures of an existing high-performance data transfer system for computational Grids. We present empirical results showing that the classifier is extremely accurate, efficient enough to execute in real time, and that utilizing the information it provides can have a tremendous impact on the performance of a largescale data transfer.