This invention relates to the field of packet communications. More particularly, this invention is a method and system for using a jitter absorption buffer to absorb propagation delay variation in packet arrival time. The invention uses a finite state machine with two or more sates, such as L (210), M (220), H (230), LR (215), MR (225), and HR (235). State transitions occur based on events such as overflow (3081, 3241, 352), underflow (3081, 3241, 35 4), half full (316, 336, 356), or time expired (328, 344). According to one embodiment, when the measured delay variation exceeds a threshold, the buffer size is hitlessly increased, and when it is below the threshold, the buffer size is hitlessly decreased._