Patent ID: 7990982

Claim:
A method to determine confidence intervals for network traffic estimation, the method comprising: determining a hierarchical sampling topology representative of multiple data sampling and aggregation stages, the hierarchical sampling topology comprising a plurality of nodes connected by a plurality of edges, each node corresponding to at least one of a data source and a data aggregation operation, and each edge corresponding to a respective data sampling operation characterized by a respective generalized sampling threshold determined from a respective sampling probability function also characterizing the respective data sampling operation; selecting one of the generalized sampling thresholds to obtain a selected generalized sampling threshold, the selected generalized sampling threshold being selected from a set of the generalized sampling thresholds associated with a respective set of the edges originating at a respective set of the nodes, the set of the nodes being a set of descendent nodes of a target node undergoing network traffic estimation; and transforming a measured sample of network traffic associated with the target node into a confidence interval for a network traffic estimate associated with the target node using the selected generalized sampling threshold and an error parameter.