Patent ID: 7353294

Claim:
A method for estimating the mean traffic between origin-destination node pairs of an IP network comprising a plurality of nodes connected by a plurality of links, each link being assigned a weight used to determine the shortest path route between the shortest path route being the set of links connecting the nodes having the lowest possible sum of weights, the traffic matrix describing the total amount of traffic between each origin-destination node pair in the network over a given time period k being X(k), the method comprising: collecting link utilization values at different times denoted k, wherein k=0, 1, 2, . . . , K−1; constructing link count vectors Y(k) using the collected link utilization values; constructing routing matrices A(k) using the IP network's topological information and the weight assigned to each link in the IP network at each time k, such that Y(k)=A(k)X(k); deleting missing and redundant rows in Y(k) and in A(k) to produce Y′(k) and A′(k), such that Y′(k)=A′(k)X(k); modeling the traffic matrix X(k) as stationary, such that X(k)=X+W(k), wherein W(k) is a traffic fluctuation vector and X is a vector describing the mean traffic between each origin-destination node pair in the IP network; defining, in block matrix notation: Y = [ Y ′ ⁡ ( 0 ) Y ′ ⁡ ( 1 ) … Y ′ ⁡ ( K - 1 ) ] ; A = [ A ′ ⁡ ( 0 ) A ′ ⁡ ( 1 ) … A ′ ⁡ ( K - 1 ) ] ; and estimating X, the vector describing the mean traffic between each origin-destination node pair in the IP network, as {circumflex over (X)}, such that {circumflex over (X)}=(A T A) −1 A T Y.