SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING HIERARCHICAL HEAVY HITTERS IN A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ENVIRONMENT

A method including receiving a plurality of elements of a data stream, storing a multi-dimensional data structure in a memory, said multi-dimensional data structure storing the plurality of elements as a hierarchy of nodes, each node having a frequency count corresponding to the number of elements stored therein, comparing the frequency count of each node to a threshold value based on a total number of the elements stored in the nodes and identifying each node for which the frequency count is at least as great as the threshold value as a hierarchical heavy hitter (HHH) node and propagating the frequency count of each non-HHH nodes to its corresponding parent nodes.