Patent ID: 8239565

Claim:
A flow record restriction apparatus that is placed in a network interconnecting a plurality of terminals and that is connected to a measurement terminal for measuring traffic in the network via a measurement network, comprising: a flow record generation unit configured to determine a set of packets having the same attribute to be a flow of the same communication, and to generate a flow record based on header information of the packets for each flow; a flow record number restriction unit including a management buffer for temporarily storing flow records generated by the flow record generation unit, the flow record number restriction unit being configured to read the flow records from the management buffer and output the flow records; a plurality of search target buffers; and a flow record transmission unit configured to packetize the flow records output from the flow record number restriction unit to transmit packets over the measurement network, wherein, when a number of flow records stored in the management buffer exceeds a preset upper limit value, the flow record number restriction unit divides the stored flow records into non-aggregation flow records and aggregation candidates having lower importance in measurement of traffic than the non-aggregation flow records, aggregates flow records determined to be the aggregation candidates, and performs control such that a number of flow records stored in the management buffer becomes equal to or less than a predetermined number, wherein each of the search target buffers is configured to store aggregated flow records, each of which is obtained by aggregating flow records which satisfy an aggregation condition, the aggregation condition comprising a predetermined number of items less than the number of items of the flow generation condition, and wherein the flow record number restriction unit is configured to aggregate an aggregation target in the aggregation candidates by comparing the aggregation target with the aggregated flow record in one of the search target buffers corresponding to an aggregation condition while changing the aggregation condition.