Abstract: A mechanism is disclosed for identifying and penalizing misbehaving flows in a network. In one implementation, a set of behavioral statistics are maintained for each flow. These behavioral statistics are updated as information packets belonging to a flow are processed. Based upon these behavioral statistics, a determination is made as to whether a flow is exhibiting undesirable behavior. If so, a penalty is imposed on the flow. In one implementation, this penalty causes packets belonging to the flow to have a higher probability of being dropped than packets belonging to other flows that do not exhibit undesirable behavior. In one implementation, in addition to penalizing the flow, this penalty also has the effect of correcting the flow's behavior such that the flow exhibits less undesirable behavior after the penalty than before. By correcting the flow's behavior, the penalty makes it possible for the flow to become a non-misbehaving flow.

Abstract: A mechanism is disclosed for identifying and penalizing misbehaving flows in a network. In one implementation, a set of behavioral statistics are maintained for each flow. These behavioral statistics are updated as information packets belonging to a flow are processed. Based upon these behavioral statistics, a determination is made as to whether a flow is exhibiting undesirable behavior. If so, a penalty is imposed on the flow. In one implementation, this penalty causes packets belonging to the flow to have a higher probability of being dropped than packets belonging to other flows that do not exhibit undesirable behavior. In one implementation, in addition to penalizing the flow, this penalty also has the effect of correcting the flow's behavior such that the flow exhibits less undesirable behavior after the penalty than before. By correcting the flow's behavior, the penalty makes it possible for the flow to become a non-misbehaving flow.

Abstract: A method of filtering an incoming data packet stream in a data packet transmission system. The method comprises a step of defining a tree-like hierarchy for a plurality of filter conditions such that the filter conditions are divided into groups of filters, each of the groups associated with one or more fields having pre-determined condition values. The groups are arranged in long edges of the tree-like hierarchy. Next, a data packet stream is received at a point of ingress to the data packet transmission system and condition values along the edges of the tree-like hierarchy are compared to specified portions of the data packet stream to determine where there are matches. If matches are made along an entire edge of the tree-like hierarchy, the data packet stream is filtered according to the number of condition values compared as opposed to the number of filters.

Abstract: A method and system for performing a route lookup in a routing system, including a plurality of routes places a bound on the number of accesses to the memory necessary to perform a route lookup and guarantees the minimal amount of memory to achieve a particular bound. For each node the memory required to meet a bound on the depth of the tree rooted at that node is computed, given the distribution of routes in the network.