Patent ID: 7154853

Claim:
A method of flow rate-based policy checking for non-compliancy, comprising: receiving data from a flow at a present time for a current integration window; determining whether an integration window time counter has expired based on a lapsed time interval; declaring the current integration window compliant and opening a new integration window if the integration window time counter has expired; declaring the flow non-compliant and transitioning to a non-compliant state if the integration window time counter has not expired, one more unit of data is remaining, and one more integration window cycle is remaining; declaring the current integration window non-compliant and opening the new integration window if the integration window time counter has not expired, one more unit of data is remaining, and at least two integration window cycles are remaining; and continuing to check for non-compliancy and maintaining the current integration window open if the integration window time counter has not expired and at least two units of data are remaining, wherein declaring the current integration window non-compliant and opening the new integration window includes: decrementing the multiple windows counter by one, setting the integration window time counter to that of an integration window time threshold, setting the data counter to that of a data counter threshold, and setting a previous time stamp to that of the present time.