DISTRIBUTED CACHE - ADAPTIVE MULTICAST ARCHITECTURE FOR BANDWIDTH REDUCTION

摘要

Disclosed is a method and system for maximizing the use of available bandwidth on an ISP communication system between an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and remote locations where at least one of the remote locations has a remote cache. An embodiment may monitor downstream unicast traffic, estimate the downstream unicast bandwidth used by unicast replies to the remote locations, and determine a remaining multicast bandwidth available to send multicast messages to the remote caches. An embodiment may create a pool of the cacheable objects being sent to the remote locations from the downstream traffic. An embodiment may determine bandwidth savings for each object in the pool of cacheable objects that would be achieved by remotely caching each object and prioritize the pool of cacheable objects based on the determined bandwidth savings for each object. An embodiment may create a queue of objects to multicast to the remote caches based on the pool of cacheable objects and the remaining multicast bandwidth and then multicast the queue to the remote caches. The remote caches may intercept and reply to requests for objects held in the remote cache without accessing the ISP communication system, thus, saving bandwidth on the ISP communication system.