Patent ID: 7065573

Claim:
A system for monitoring and controlling quality of service and availability of a discrete event system composed of a computer communications network having intermediate nodes, said system comprising: an intermediate device, said intermediate device including memory for storing a traffic intensity surface therein, said intermediate device adapted to monitor traffic intensity by modeling the traffic intensity as a partial differential equation, said intermediate device sampling queue state information in intermediate nodes in said network and from this queue state information estimating the parameters of the partial differential equation model and solving the partial differential equation to produce the traffic intensity surface; said intermediate device configured to control traffic intensity by using several actuation mechanisms that include creating routes that minimize transit through congested regions of said network and downloading said routes to intermediate nodes for use in updating their forwarding tables, that include determining optimal times and locations for content caches to operate in said network and downloading said times and locations to cache content managers in said network, that include determining whether to correct bandwidth imbalances in said network either by buying and selling of short term bandwidth or by actuation of said network's topology and resources, including links and intermediate node capacities, and downloading said bandwidth actuations to bandwidth managers in the computer communications network; and a set of traffic actuation devices, said devices including intermediate nodes responsible for relaying traffic between links in the computer communications network, including cache content managers responsible for deciding where to locate content caches in the computer communications network and when to have each content cache active, including bandwidth managers responsible for adding or deleting bandwidth in the computer communications network either temporarily or permanently.