Monitoring Large Flows in Network

In order to provide high quality network management, traffic scheduling and network security, we need the per flow traffic information. However, in a highspeed net link, the flows number is so large that it is infeasible to gather and process all flows’ information accurately and efficiently. Several studies showed that a small percentage of flows account for most of the total network throughput. Therefore, monitoring just the highspeed flows is an efficient and practical method in traffic control. Before being able to monitor large flows, they must be distinguished first. Several papers have studied the problem of finding large flows, but the methods are either too complicated or request relatively too much memory and computation resources. In this paper, we present and analyze a simple but efficient algorithm to figure out the elephant flows. The proposed method only need few counters and can figure out nearly all the predefined large flows.