Efficiently Passive Monitoring Flow Bandwidth

Using the flow-conservation law, we could reduce the number of activated monitor agents used to monitor link bandwidth usage. In this paper, we address the problem of efficiently passive monitoring flow bandwidth based on flow-conservation, which could be reduced to weak vertex cover problem. And the weak vertex cover problem is NP-hard. We give an approximation algorithm with approximation ratio 2 to solve the problem. The effectiveness of our monitoring algorithm is validated by simulations evaluation over a wide range of network topologies