US Patent 9015299 Link grouping for route optimization

A technique manages route optimization for one or more groups of links in a computer network. According to the novel technique, each group or “subgroup” of links comprises one or more links, wherein the group may be configured based on various measures, such as, e.g., connectivity (physical or virtual), policies to be applied, per-prefix, per-application (e.g., Internet traffic or voice over IP, VoIP), geographic location, and/or quality-based (e.g., primary links and secondary/backup links). One or more policies may be defined for the groups of links (i.e., where these group policies are to be applied to the group as a whole), in addition to policies that may be defined for individual to links and/or prefixes. Once the link groups are established, traffic over the groups of links (e.g., routes to reachable address prefixes) may be managed and optimized according to the group policies, such as in accordance with Optimized Edge Routing (OER) techniques.