Patent attributes
In general, the disclosure describes techniques for assigning traffic originating from an unknown application to a link based on known application quality of experience metrics. For instance, a network device may receive an application data packet of a data flow for an application and determine an application signature of the application data packet. The network device may determine whether the application signature matches an entry in an application signature database, and if the application signature does not match, the network device may identify a class of the application based on one or more characteristics of the application data packet. The network device may then assign the application data packet of the data flow to a first link of a plurality of links based on the class of the application and quality of experience (QoE) metrics for each link.