Patent ID: 7792057

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving, from one or more ingress routers, a first set of records including data corresponding to network traffic; receiving, from one or more egress routers, a second set of records including data corresponding to network traffic; creating a multicast traffic matrix using at least a portion of the data included in the first and second sets of records, wherein creating the multicast traffic matrix comprises removing, from the first set of records, records of network traffic not sent to multicast groups; determining multicast group information for a first record of the first set of records; determining if a second record of the second set of records includes corresponding multicast group information; determining, if the first and second records have corresponding multicast group information, whether a first time interval of the first record overlaps a second time interval of the second record; determining, if the first time interval overlaps the second time interval, a value based on the overlap; and allocating an amount of traffic in the second record to a multicast group corresponding to the multicast group information based on the value.