Patent ID: 9325590
Filing Date: 2016-04-26
CPC Classification: G06Q,H04L,H04N

Claim Text:
1. A method comprising: querying, by a computer server via a computer network, a first switch of the computer network to determine which ports of the first switch are connected to other switches; recursively querying, by the computer server, each of the other switches via the computer network to determine which ports of the other switches are connected to further switches; storing a corresponding switch-mapping in a storage device, the switch-mapping indicating how the ports of the switches are interconnected; receiving, by the computer server, first network traffic transmitted on the computer network by a first client device, wherein the first network traffic includes an indication of a known location within an establishment from where first network traffic was transmitted; querying one or more of the switches of the computer network according to the switch-mapping in order to follow an address of the first client device included in the first network traffic and thereby determine a source access-node of the computer network from which the first network traffic originated, wherein the source access-node is a port of a particular switch from which the first network traffic originated that is not connected to any other switch; storing a mapping of the source access-node to the known location in the storage device; receiving, by the computer server, second network traffic transmitted on the computer network, wherein the second network traffic is transmitted by a second client device and does not include any indication of the known location; querying the one or more of the switches of the computer network in order to follow an address of the second client device included in the second network traffic according to the switch-mapping and thereby determine that the second network traffic also originated from the source access-node; and automatically determining the second client device to be at the known location within the establishment according to the mapping in the storage device; wherein the computer server does not receive any indication of the known location from the second client device.