Patent ID: 7139242

Claim:
A method facilitating the distribution of traffic flows across a plurality of routing peers, the traffic flows transmitted from a first computer network to hosts associated with respective destination networks, and wherein there is at least one path from the first computer network to each destination network, the method comprising the steps of monitoring traffic flows from a first computer network to a plurality of respective destination networks; generating an ordered list of destination networks based on a traffic flow statistic value associated with each destination network, for each destination network in the ordered list, associating the routing peer(s) having reachability to the destination network; and iteratively performing a load balancing cycle until all destination networks have been assigned a routing peer, the load balancing cycle comprising: for a first routing peer: selecting the first unassigned destination network to which the first routing peer has reachability and assigning the selected destination network to the first routing peer; and setting a traffic flow weighting value to the traffic flow statistic value associated with the selected destination network; for each subsequent routing peer: selecting the first unassigned destination network to which the routing peer has reachability; assigning the selected destination network to the routing peer; repeating the selecting step until the traffic flow statistic values associated with the selected destination network(s) aggregate beyond a threshold level derived from the traffic flow weighting value; and assigning the selected destination network(s) to the routing peer.