MULTICAST DELIVERY

摘要

A method and nodes in a communication network for controlling multi-cast delivery of files, wherein the multi-cast delivery is adapted to reduce the amount of required uni-cast file deliveries in the communication network. A browser of an IPTV Terminating Function requiring a file interrogates a cache of the IFT for the file content before a uni-cast request for file delivery is sent to an Application Service Platform. The files stored in the cache have been previously delivered to the IFT via the proposed multi-cast mechanism. If the file content is not stored in the cache, a uni-cast request is sent to the ASP. Each uni-cast request is also forwarded to a Multi-Cast Controller, which determines whether the requested file should be sent also to a plurality of additional IFTs on a multi-cast channel. At each IFT, listening to the multi-cast channel, the received content can be handled selectively according to a filtering mechanism, and a received file may, e.g. be stored in the cache for later retrieval.