US Patent 7185103 Rate-controlled transmission of traffic flow information

Network analysis techniques are described for generating and outputting traffic flow packets which include traffic flow information indicative of network traffic flows. More specifically, the traffic flow packets may be generated and output in a rate-controlled fashion, which can avoid data loss of traffic flow information in the traffic flow packets. For example, rate-controlled transmission can be extremely useful in ensuring that transmitted traffic flow packets will be received by a packet flow collector without overloading input buffers of the packet flow collector.