SERVER INITIATED MULTIPATH CONTENT DELIVERY

摘要

Described herein are—among other things—systems, methods, and apparatus for accelerating and increasing the reliability of content delivery by serving objects redundantly over multiple paths from multiple servers. In preferred embodiments, the decision to use such multipath delivery is made on the server side. A content server can modify or generate a given web page so as to invoke multipath, e.g., by injecting markup language directives and/or script instructions that will cause the client device to make multiple requests for a given object on the page. Preferably the multiple requests are made to separate content servers in separate points of presence. The teachings hereof may be advantageously implemented, without limitation, in intermediary servers such as caching proxy servers and/or in origin servers.

主权项

1. A multipath content delivery system, comprising:
a client device that sends a request for a markup language document to a particular content server; the particular content server programmed to respond to the request with the markup language document, where the markup language document contains two or more universal resource locators (URLs) for an object, the hostname of one of the two or more URLs resolving to the particular content server and the hostnames other of the two or more URLs resolving to one or more other content servers, the particular content server and the one or more other content servers all being distinct from one another; the client device programmed to generate, in response to the two or more URLs to the object, two or more requests for the object, wherein at least one request is to the particular content server and the other requests are to the one or more other content servers.