Verizon Digital Media Services Inc.

Edgecast Networks, Inc.

Timothy W Hartrick

Alexander A Kazerani

Jayson G Sakata

Robert J Peters

Donnevan Scott Yeager

Hossein Lotfi

Juan Bran

Marc Hasson

Some embodiments provide a director agent, a server agent, and a specialized hand-off protocol for improving scalability and resource usage within a server farm. A first network connection is established between a client and the director agent in order to receive a content request from the client from which to select a server from a set of servers that is responsible for hosting the requested content. A second network connection is established between the server agent that is associated with the selected server and a protocol stack of the selected server. The first network connection is handed-off to the server agent using the specialized hand-off protocol. The server agent performs network connection state parameter transformations between the two connections to create a network connection through which content can be passed from the selected server to the client without passing through the director.

Network connection hand-off and hand-back

Some embodiments provide a proprietary 64-bit consistent distribution scheme that preserves the efficiencies of CARP while providing a significantly more balanced distribution of requests that is on par with schemes reliant on computationally expensive cryptographic hashes. The scheme performs hashing of requested URLs and identifiers of available servers over a 64-bit space while optimizing the hashing to remove computationally expensive operations. Some embodiments provide a variant of the scheme to provide a differentiated distribution on the basis of one or more differentiating factors. A first variant utilizes load factor values to adjust the resulting hashes and to produce a first distribution of differentiated content that varies from a second distribution of undifferentiated content. A second variant identifies requests for differentiated content from requests for undifferentiated content and utilizes a first scheme to distribute the differentiated content and a second altered scheme to distribute the undifferentiated content.

Optimized consistent request distribution for balanced load distribution in a content delivery network

Some embodiments provide a transport session discovery protocol that enables load balancing devices of an Anycast reliant distributed platform to route legacy control messages to destinations within the distributed platform that manage the sessions or connections implicated by the legacy control messages, even when the implicated sessions or connections cannot be directly identified from the control message headers. The modified load balancing operation as a result of the transport session discovery protocol involves identifying a message header mapping to an unrecognized session or connection, extracting session or connection identifying information and an error or condition from the message body, generating a new messaging construct to encapsulate the extracted information, and multicasting the messaging construct to other load balancing devices operating within a common point-of-presence. The load balancing device having knowledge of the server managing the implicated session then routes the error or condition to that server.

Control message routing within anycast reliant platforms

Network connection hand-off using state transformations

Growing community of inventors

Boulder, CO, United States of America

Timothy W Hartrick