Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
2000-06-28
2003-05-13
Breene, John (Department: 2177)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06564214
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of determining whether or not information within a character string is valid, and, more particularly, to a technique for validating that a string within a data record matches a pre-stored valid identifier to permit association of the data record with other data records having common identifiers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Both communication network service providers and their customers recognize an increasing need to accurately measure operational performance of data communications networks. Communications networks are currently utilized in various applications for transmission and reception of data between parties at different locations. A typical data transmission system includes a plurality of customers linked by one or more data packet switching networks. Ordinarily, when a party needs to send and receive data over distances, the party (customer) enters into a service contract with a service provider to provide access to a data communications network.
Depending on an individual customer's needs, the service contract may include provisions that guarantee certain minimum performance requirements that the service provider must meet. Among the performance metrics that need to be monitored to comply with such requirements may be those that reflect system performance from the perspective of the end user. For example, a service contract may specify a minimum access speed or a maximum allowable percentage of time that a user gets a busy signal when dialing into the network (e.g., a specified access attempt success/failure rate or a dial up success/failure rate). Further, if the customer expects to send and receive a particular amount of data on a regular basis, the customer may want the service provider to guarantee that a specified minimum bandwidth or throughput rate will be available to the customer at all times. The service provider may be required to ensure that the amount of time the network is unavailable to the customer is less than a specified percentage. Certain customer applications are sensitive to transmission delays and/or the loss of data within the network. Thus, the customer may want the service provider to guarantee that the average or minimum ratio of data units delivered by the network to data units offered to the network at the far-end is above a certain percentage (e.g., a maximum packet loss rate) and/or that the average or maximum transmission delays or a maximum variation in delays (jitter) will not exceed a certain duration.
From a service provider's perspective, it would be competitively advantageous to be able to demonstrate to potential and existing customers that the service provider is capable of meeting and does meet such network performance metrics. Thus, the capability to provide analysis of network system performance at the service level, particularly in the context of network systems that share bandwidth between end-points or sites, would be advantageous from both a customer and service provider standpoint.
Internet service providers (ISP), who provide Internet connectivity to many customers, are an example of service providers that may want to monitor their networks to ensure acceptable operation. In a typical configuration, an ISP provides several Points of Presence for user access. A Point of Presence (POP) is a local exchange that users dial into via a modem and which connects the users to a wide area or global communication network, such as the Internet. To connect to the network, a customer configures his computer to dial a telephone number associated with a local POP. Once the hardware at the POP answers, the POP initiates data communications with the client. The POP is coupled to the network via well-known systems that need not be described in detail herein.
Performance metrics that reflect end-user experience are of particular interest to ISPs and their customers. A network monitoring system capable of accurately assessing and determining network service perform from the perspective of an end user is described in U.S. Pat. No. 09/256,647, pending to Chu et al., the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. In the network performance monitoring system described by Chu et al., user modules within the machines of end users upload monitoring data to a data collector of a backend data processing system. Data records from several such data collectors are aggregated and organized in a backend aggregator module. The aggregator is responsible for directing data to relational databases and information reporting engines to produce information useful for assessing operation performance, system troubleshooting and system planning.
In order to generate meaningful information that can be used to analyze system performance and troubleshoot system problems, the aggregator must organize data by associating like data with like data. For example, it is more informational to group failed connections by POP rather than grouping all failed connections together. If one POP is having more login failures per attempt than other POPs, the service provider may want to focus on troubleshooting the equipment at that POP. Thus, knowing the POP associated with monitoring data from various end-users allows the database/reporting engine to group data on a POP basis, thereby allowing the service provider to glean information about performance of equipment at individual POPs.
One of the pieces of information within data records uploaded to the aggregator is the phone string dialed by the modem. This string indicates which POP or phone number the caller may have dialed. The string containing the POP may contain one or more of the following tokens: escape characters to reach an outside line (e.g. “9,” from a typical US Hotel); pause characters (e.g. “,”); a country code; a code to indicate calls to a foreign country (e.g. “011” in U.S.); a code to indicate calls across area codes/regions (e.g. “1” in U.S.); an area code; a local number; calling card information; ISDN information; extraneous characters; and other miscellaneous characters.
In a global environment, where the escape codes are different in different countries and the length of codes is variable, many of the tokens are optional, and many dialed numbers are incorrect, parsing a raw string of characters and deriving a corresponding POP number is a challenging exercise. The quality of this derivation process directly impacts the value of the data for the operators of the POP. It is important that as much of the valuable data possible is extracted; however, incorrectly identifying the POP number can waste considerable operational investigation resources. Some service providers' dialers guide the users in selecting a phone number from a phonebook (downloaded to users' PCs); however, most of these dialers still allow the end users to enter any number they desire.
The difficulty of correctly identifying the POP associated with end-user monitoring data is a unique problem faced by backend data processors of network monitoring systems. For example, conventional telephone switching devices deal with this problem in an easier manner, because the telephone number dialed is rigidly structured, and the switching devices have a context in which to parse the information. Secondly, if a telephone switching device does not understand the format of the dialed number (e.g. if the user mis-dialed), the switching device can reject the number with an appropriate error message that then forces the user to dial a number that the switching device can parse. In a backend data aggregating system, there is no standard context in which to parse the data string containing the POP (e.g., the kind of logic used in a hotel private branch exchange (PBX) does not exist).
Conventional switching devices inherently ensure accurate string parsing in the course of connecting users that provide valid, parsable information and simply reject any unparsable information at the time of transmission by failin
Breene John
Lewis Cheryl
Visual Networks Technologies, Inc.
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