Flow autodetermination

Abstract

Autodetermination circuitry examines packets transmitted internally to an egress port of a switching device in order to learn the associated flow. The autodetermination circuitry maintains a flow memory recording the highest traffic volume flows and unlearns the flows exhibiting lower traffic volumes to make room for other higher traffic volume flows. Accordingly, as some flows decrease in traffic volume and other flows increase in traffic volume, the flows decreasing below a threshold are dropped from a flow memory, and other flows increasing in volume above the threshold are added to the flow memory. In this manner, only the most likely offending flows are maintained in the flow memory. Accordingly, when congestion is detected, the switching device can identify one or more source devices contributing the most to the congestion and take steps to alleviate the congestion by decreasing the traffic volume originating from one or more of those sources.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.