Patent attributes
Assigning priority values to applications in advance facilitates later precedence ordering of the application identifiers when processing network traffic. The priority values can be assigned according to defined rules that satisfy a paradigm for application precedence in policy enforcement. When multiple application identifiers are determined from inspecting network traffic of a flow, a control plane process retrieves the assigned priority values and sorts the application identifiers according to the priority values. The control plane then communicates the sorted list of application identifiers to the data plane. The data plane enforces policies set for the applications identified in the list of application identifiers on the corresponding network traffic flow according to the order of precedence conveyed by the sorted list. This allows flexible and accurate policy enforcement on network traffic.
