Patent ID: 8817629

Claim:
A method for routing-assisted traffic monitoring comprising: providing a macro-flowset representing a set of flows for a network, the macro-flowset having an associated ingress routing device and an associated egress routing device, and wherein the macro-flowset comprises a plurality of micro-flowsets, each micro-flowset comprising one or more flows; determining, by a controller, a micro-flowset routing for the set of flows, the micro-flowset routing defining which of a set of directed links connecting a plurality of routing devices are used to route each of the flows from the respective ingress routing device to the respective egress routing device, wherein determining the micro-flowset routing includes: determining a sampling characteristic for each link of the set of directed links representing the ability of the link to sample traffic; determining a sampling utility for each micro-flowset representing the importance of measuring the micro-flowset, wherein the importance of measuring each micro-flowset corresponds to the importance of a destination port, the destination port being specified in a sampled data packet's Internet Protocol (IP) header; and maximizing, subject to routing constraints of an overall Traffic Engineering (TE) policy, a sampling resolution function representing the monitoring effectiveness of the micro-flowset routing based on the link sampling characteristics and the micro-flowset sampling utilities; and transmitting, by the controller, flow information to at least a first routing device of the plurality of routing devices according to the micro-flowset routing, the flow information defining which of the set of directed links are to be used to route at least one flow entering the first routing device to a second routing device of the plurality of routing devices.