Algorithm based on multiple filters for elephant flows identification

Identifying elephant flows is very important in developing effective and efficient traffic engineering schemes. In this paper, according to the characteristic of network flows, an algorithm based on multiple filters is proposed to realize elephant flows identification. Multiple filters algorithm improves the performance and saves the storage from three aspects: large flows handled firstly, using Timeout-Counting Bloom Filter to filtrate small flows and using Multilayer Counting Bloom Filters to identify large flows. The theoretical analysis and the simulation result indicates that under the condition of existing some tolerable measurement error about the length of flows, our algorithm can identify elephant flows accurately, which reduce the storage space and improve the processing speed efficiently.