Patent Document ID: 7545748
Application ID: 10938435
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method facilitating management of network traffic, comprising detecting, at a network device, data flows in network traffic traversing a communications path, wherein the data flows each comprise at least one packet transmitted between respective source and destination nodes; maintaining, at the network device, one or more metrics in association with each of the data flows, wherein the one or more metrics is orthogonal to the explicitly presented attributes of the packets in the data flows; matching the data flow to a plurality of traffic classes, wherein at least one of the traffic classes is defined, at least in part, by one or more metric values, wherein matching the data flow, for the at least one of the traffic classes, comprises comparing the one or more metrics associated with the data flow to corresponding ones of the one or metric values of the at least one of the traffic classes; and having found a matching traffic class in the plurality of traffic classes, associating the data flow with the matching traffic class; wherein at least one of the one or more metrics is a behavioral metric corresponding to the source or destination nodes relative to a behavioral attribute the behavioral attribute being an instance of any of the following: a total number of current connections a total number of current connections for which a node is client, a total number of current connections for which a node is a server, a total number of current TCP connections, a total number of UDP connections, a server new flow rate, a client new flow rate, a server TCP new flow rate, a server UDP new flow rate, a client TCP new flow rate, a client UDP new flow rate, a rate of failed flows.