Flow and time based reassembly of fragmented packets by IP protocol analyzers

1. A method, performed by a computer system having one or more processors and memory storing one or more programs for execution by the one or more processors, for processing a plurality of fragments of IP packet flows in a communications network, the method comprising steps of:

receiving the plurality of packet fragments, wherein the received packet fragments are associated with one or more packet flows over a preconfigured time sliding window (TSW) composed of a contiguous set of M time intervals, wherein each interval is a preselected fixed duration of ts milliseconds;

selecting a first set of N packet flows from a first pass through of the one or more received packet flows, the first set of N packet flows corresponding to a subset of the plurality of packet fragments received during a first predefined time interval of the set of M time intervals of the TSW;

generating a unique list of F n non-repeated flow identifiers for the first selected set of N packet flows of non-repeated flow identifiers;

determining, by a second pass through of the received packet flows, if a received packet fragment is associated with a flow identifier contained in the generated unique list of F n non-repeated flow identifiers;

discarding the received packet fragment not found in the preconfigured TSW, based upon the determination of whether the received packet fragment is not associated with a flow identifier contained in the generated unique list of non-repeated flow identifiers; and

reassembling only packet fragments associated with the first set of packet flows into full packets only if the packet fragments are received in the first predetermined time interval.

2. The method as recited in claim 1 , further comprising discarding packet fragments that are not associated with the first set of packet flows.

3. The method as recited in claim 1 , further comprising presenting the full packets to a user by the computer system.

4. The method as recited in claim 3 , wherein the step of presenting the full packets to the user further comprises the step of performing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) analysis on the full packets prior to presenting the full packets to the user.

5. The method as recited in claim 3 , wherein the size of the subset is selected based on a number of the full packets to be presented to the user.

6. The method as recited in claim 1 , further comprising the steps of:

selecting a second set of packet flows, from the one or more received packet flows, corresponding to a subset of the plurality of packet segments received during a second predefined time interval; and

reassembling only packet fragments associated with the second set of packet flows into full packets.

7. The method as recited in claim 1 , wherein bandwidth characteristics of the transmission link vary over time.

8. The method as recited in claim 1 , wherein each fragment of the plurality of packet fragments contains a valid IP header comprising a flow identifier on the basis of a Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) for a transmission link within the communication network.

9. The method as recited in claim 8 , wherein each fragment of the plurality of packet fragments is correlated with a corresponding packet flow based on the flow identifier.