Patent ID: 7894340

Claim:
A method of managing the activity status of flows in a packet-switched telecommunications network, a flow being considered active in said network if a time elapsed since detection of the last packet of the flow is less than a predetermined time-out period, said method comprising, for each packet received belonging to the flow: a step of determining, from an identifier of said flow, a location of a register for said flow in a data structure of fixed size, each flow register including an identical predetermined number of bits, said data structure including a plurality of flow registers configured to store a value representing the activity of said flow; an initialization step during which a first binary value is stored in each of said bits in each of said plural flow registers; a pointing step using an index for pointing toward a bit of each of said plural flow registers in said data structure; wherein the method further comprising: an updating process that stores a second binary value in each bit pointed to by said index for each of said plural flow registers and that cyclically increments a value of said index at a given frequency; and a step of determining an activity status of said flow using a value stored in the bit pointed to by said index for a flow register of said plural flow registers having the location in said data structure which is determined by an identifier of said flow.