Automatic discovery and enforcement of service level agreement settings
First Claim
1. A method of automatically detecting service level agreement (SLA) settings for a network path between a data source device sending user packets to a data sink device comprising:
- generating, at a traffic generator device, synthetic packets and inserting said synthetic packets on said network path along with said user packets at a level that exceeds a committed information rate (CIR) setting of said network path;
collecting, at a discovery device, at least two valid traffic samples from said network path, wherein said valid traffic sample comprises a sum of number of bytes of user packets and synthetic packets measured between two consecutive losses of synthetic packets; and
determining, at said discovery device, from the collected traffic samples the CIR enforced by said network.
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Accused Products
Abstract
A method of automatically detecting the service level agreement settings in an Ethernet virtual circuit (EVC) carrying user packets comprises generating synthetic packets different from the user packets, on a data path in the EVC at a level sufficiently high to saturate the EVC. This accelerates the detection of actual effective values for the Committed Information Rate (CIR) and the Excess Information Rate (EIR) by triggering traffic shaping devices in the data path to enforce the CIR and EIR settings configured for those devices. A plurality of traffic samples are collected from the data path during a sampling period that is long enough to allow the collection of at least two valid traffic samples, where a valid traffic sample is the amount of user packets measured between two consecutive losses of synthetic packets. The CIR and EIR values enforced by the traffic shaping devices are determined from the collected samples.
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Citations
14 Claims
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1. A method of automatically detecting service level agreement (SLA) settings for a network path between a data source device sending user packets to a data sink device comprising:
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generating, at a traffic generator device, synthetic packets and inserting said synthetic packets on said network path along with said user packets at a level that exceeds a committed information rate (CIR) setting of said network path; collecting, at a discovery device, at least two valid traffic samples from said network path, wherein said valid traffic sample comprises a sum of number of bytes of user packets and synthetic packets measured between two consecutive losses of synthetic packets; and determining, at said discovery device, from the collected traffic samples the CIR enforced by said network. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
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11. A system for automatically detecting service level agreement (SLA) settings for a network path between a data source device sending user packets to a data sink device comprising:
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a traffic generator device to generate synthetic packets on said network path at a level that exceeds the CIR enforced by the network to detect a committed information rate CIR enforced by said network; a discovery device collecting at least two valid traffic samples from said network path, wherein said valid traffic samples comprises a sum of number of bytes of user packets and synthetic packets measured between two consecutive losses of synthetic packets; and said discovery device to determine from the collected traffic samples the CIR value enforced by said traffic shaping devices. - View Dependent Claims (12, 13, 14)
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Specification