METHOD FOR CONTENT-AWARE REDIRECTION AND CONTENT RENAMING

• US 20130013747A1
• Filed: 09/14/2012
• Published: 01/10/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 12/14/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: AT&T Corporation (AT&T, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Corporation (AT&T, Inc.)
• Inventors: Cranor, Charles D., Gopalakrishnan, Raman, Green, Matthew D., Kalmanek, Charles Robert Jr., Shur, David Hilton, Sibal, Sandeep, van der Merwe, Jacobus E.
• Granted Patent: US 8,660,115 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/219
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1014 based on the content of a request
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1019 Random or heuristic server selection
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1034 Reaction to server failures by a load balancer
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/63 Routing a service request depending on the request content or context

Abstract

The present invention is directed to mechanisms for content-aware redirection and content exchange/content discovery that permit a request for content to be redirected to a particular advantageous server that can serve the content.

Claims

1. A method for distributing content in a packet-switched network comprising the steps of:

receiving from a client a request for content identified by a resource identifier;

querying a mapping service using the resource identifier of the content;

receiving a list of servers in the network that store the content identified by the resource identifier; and

redirecting the client to one of the servers using a second resource identifier.

2. The invention of claim 1 wherein the client is redirected using protocol-based redirection.

3. The invention of claim 1 wherein the client is redirected using a helper file.

4. The invention of claim 1 wherein the resource identifier is a URN and the second resource identifier is a URL.

5. A method for distributing content in a packet-switched network comprising the steps of:

storing in a database a list of servers in the network that store content identified by a resource identifier;

updating the database as content stored on the servers change;

responding to queries requesting content identified by a resource identifier with the list of servers that store the content, wherein the list of servers can be used to redirect clients to one of the servers.

6. The invention of claim 5 wherein the database has a centralized mapping server.

7. The invention of claim 6 wherein the database is updated in response to update messages received from the servers.

8. The invention of claim 5 wherein the database is distributed among servers in the network.

9. The invention of claim 8 wherein updates to the database are not broadcast to the servers and wherein queries are broadcast to the servers.