System and method for determining a customer associated with a range of IP addresses by employing a configurable rule engine with IP address range matching

摘要

A system and method for determining a customer associated with a range of IP addresses. The method includes the step of constructing an IP address matching tree using a defined range of IP addresses allocated to each customer including the steps of partitioning a minimum IP address and a maximum IP address which define the range of IP addresses into their four constituent bytes and sparsely populating a hierarchy of fixed sized arrays to allow look-up of each IP address associated with a customer. A set of network data is received including a match IP address. The customer associated with the match IP address is determined using the IP address matching tree by performing a sequence of array look-ups for each constituent byte in the match IP address. The method requires a maximum of only 4 look-ups to determine the customer associated with the match IP address.