Patent ID: 8125927

Claim:
A network appliance for topology discovery of a network comprising a plurality of heterogeneous devices, each device having at least one port, the network appliance comprising: a processor; and a computer readable medium storing processor-executable instructions organized into: a data acquisition and validation module for data collection from said plurality of heterogeneous devices and validating received data to ensure correctness and completeness; a device identification and classification module for: identifying active devices among said plurality of heterogeneous devices and producing a set of identified devices; and classifying each said identified device according to values of device descriptors acquired from said set of identified devices, said device descriptors being selected from a specified set of device descriptors; and a topology deduction module for synthesizing a network-topology image according to: classifications of said set of identified devices; address-forwarding data acquired from each port of each device among said set of identified devices; and a set of encoded connectivity patterns, each connectivity pattern defined by devices of specific device types and respective media-access data.