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.
