Patent ID: 8503298

Claim:
A method comprising: deriving, from a communication network that contains: one or more sources, nodes, and one or more targets, all connected via directed links: (i) a bandwidth capacity limit associated with each one of the links, and (ii) an initial flow rate that is transmitted by each one of the sources towards the targets via the nodes; obtaining as an input, from each one of the nodes, a gain value which corresponds to a quantitative data demand requested by the node for each flow passing through the node, wherein the quantitative data demand is given in terms of data quality and relates to data that arrives to the node from each flow; and calculating, for each one of the nodes and for each flow passing through the node, a data reduction ratio, such that the data reduction ratio achieves, when applied to the communication network: (i) a maximal overall revenue associated with the communication network, wherein the revenue for a specific node is calculated with respect to the quality of the data that arrives to the specific node, and (ii) an optimal bandwidth allocation over the links with respect to the gains from the data quality at each node, and further with respect to the limited bandwidth capacity of the links.