Opportunistic delivery of cacheable content in a communications network

摘要

Systems and methods are described for using opportunistically delayed delivery of content to address sub-optimal bandwidth resource usage in network infrastructures that allow subscribers to share forward link resources. According to some embodiments, content is identified as delayable and assigned to a delaycast queue and/or service flow. For example, a server system of a satellite communications system identifies content that can be delayed to exploit future excess link capacity through multicasting and to exploit subscriber-side storage resources. Some implementations attempt to exploit any excess link resources at any time, while others exploit unused bandwidth only during certain times or when a certain threshold of resources is available. Various embodiments also provide content scoring and/or other prioritization techniques for optimizing exploitation of the delaycast queue.

主权项

1. A system for content delivery in a communications infrastructure, the system comprising:
a request handler subsystem that determines, in response to receiving an explicit request for a media content object from a requesting subscriber terminal over the communications infrastructure, whether the media content object is a cacheable object and whether the media content object is a delayable object; and a communications processing subsystem that:
when the request handler subsystem determines that the media content object is a cacheable object and a delayable object:
assigns the delayable object to a delaycast queue having a plurality of queued content objects determined to be delayable objects; andschedules the plurality of queued content objects for multicasting over opportunistic capacity as opportunistic capacity becomes available on a communications link of the communications infrastructure; andwhen the request handler subsystem determines that the media content object is a cacheable object and not a delayable object:
assigns the media content object to a multicast service flow for streaming by the requesting subscriber terminal and for local caching by a plurality of non-requesting subscriber terminals; andschedules the media content object for multicasting substantially immediately over provisioned capacity of the communications infrastructure.