Patent ID: 8165969

Claim:
A method for minimizing costs associated with services provided by a plurality of service providers (SPs) over combined links, wherein each SP charges for utilization of its service based on a tiered pricing structure comprising one or more tiers and wherein each tier correlates to an amount of data transferred by the SP and a cost, the method comprising: forming one or more virtual combined links that each encompass two or more combined links coupled to one of the plurality of SPs, each virtual combined link to appear as a single link; merging, by a processor of a router, link data for the two or more combined links of each virtual combined link to form link data for the virtual combined link; applying a route optimization technique to one or more virtual combined links based on the combined link data, in addition to link data for one or more single links coupled to one of the plurality of SPs, wherein the route optimization technique comprises i) generating a target tier for each virtual combined link of each SP based on link utilization data for the virtual combined links wherein the target tier represents a tier contained in the SP's tiered pricing structure that correlates an amount of data transferred by the SP to a monetary cost, ii) generating a momentary target utilization rate (MTUR) for each virtual combined link of each SP based on the generated target tier for each virtual combined link of each SP and utilization of the virtual combined links wherein the MTUR represents a cumulative utilization of a virtual combined link at a particular instance of time, and iii) distributing utilization of the virtual combined links among each of the virtual combined link of each SP based on the MTUR of each virtual combined link and based on the tiered pricing structure of each SP in a manner that minimizes the monetary cost of the services provided by the SPs; and applying a further route optimization technique to the two or more combined links encompassed by each virtual combined link to distribute data traffic of the virtual combined links among the combined links in a manner that minimizes a metric value other than monetary cost.