Patent ID: 8625463

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for determining a location of a target element in a distributed network, comprising the steps of: associating one or more physical locations of network components in a distributed network to one or more sample topology elements, wherein the topology elements form a network infrastructure of the distributed network to which the network components are connected, wherein the topology elements comprise one of switches, routers, access points, logical subnets and domains or other logical or physical elements that define the network infrastructure; generating location mappings, the location mappings representing associations between the physical locations of network components associated with the one or more sample topology elements and one or more network attributes, wherein generating location mappings comprises tracking historical associations between physical locations of network components and one or more sample topology elements and using a voting algorithm to incrementally compute location confidence measures for respective sample topology elements that have more than one physical location associations with network components; and estimating a location of a target network component using the location mappings and the incrementally computed location confidence measures.