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Packet Design Engineers Receive Patent for SDN-Related Communications Traffic Technology
[July 28, 2015]

Packet Design Engineers Receive Patent for SDN-Related Communications Traffic Technology


Packet Design (News - Alert) has been awarded U.S. patent No. 9,026,674 for a system and method for accurately displaying communications traffic information. Invented by CTO Cengiz Alaettinoglu, VP of engineering Satish Kanna, and engineering manager Roopesh Palasdeokar, the patent is one of the key innovations in the company's forthcoming software defined networking (SDN) Service Assurance platform.

Significance of this patent at-a-glance:

  • SDN applications need traffic matrices to manage performance issues, avoid congestion, etc.
  • NetFlow is typically used to generate traffic matrices, but traffic flows can be reported multiple times in the network by different exporters.
  • This invention uses routing to eliminate duplicates and make NetFlow capture more flexible and scalable.
  • With more complete and accurate traffic matrices, smarter SDN orchestration is possible.

Patent specifics:

The invention identifies duplicate flows that are exported by routers along a particular service path. This allows Packet Design to collect traffic flows at different points in the network, increasing deployment flexibiliy and reducing the collection footprint to a minimum.



Packet Design's flow-path projections are used to generate network-wide traffic matrices that can be used for computing optimum paths based on current and projected bandwidth requirements. Packet Design's SDN Service Assurance platform uses these matrices, together with real-time routing analytics, performance metrics and business policies, to deliver analytics-based SDN orchestration applications.

Usually, duplicate flow detection relies on matching signatures of flows exported by different routers. However, since flow messages are created by first sampling data packets, the signatures of flows exported by different routers often do not match. Packet Design eliminates this hurdle by correlating flow paths and determining an authoritative exporter for each ingress to egress path.


"SDN creates new demands for management visibility and control," said Cengiz Alaettinoglu, Packet Design CTO. "This invention is a key enabler for intelligent orchestration by SDN controllers, and also for monitoring overlay networks and dynamic applications, such as traffic engineering, bandwidth calendaring, and virtualized network functions."

This award follows two other SDN-related patents issued to Packet Design engineers in 2014. The company will launch the SDN Service Assurance platform later this year.

About Packet Design

Packet Design technology helps the world's leading network operators, enterprises, and government agencies to deploy and assure critical services across the cloud. The Explorer products uniquely combine routing, traffic, and performance analytics for real-time, path-aware operational monitoring and back-in-time forensics for troubleshooting transient problems that can cause major service disruptions. Interactive modeling helps engineers predict the impact of changes accurately, simulate new workloads for capacity planning, and test failure scenarios to build more resilient networks. Visit http://www.packetdesign.com for more information.


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