Satellite multicast performance enhancing multicast http proxy system and method

Abstract

A communication system including an upstream proxy server and two reporting downstream proxy servers, where the upstream proxy server is capable of multicasting a uniform resource locator (URL) to the reporting downstream proxy servers, the reporting downstream proxy servers interact with the upstream proxy server to resolve cache misses and the upstream proxy servers returns a resolution to a cache miss via multicast. A downstream proxy server which filters multicast transmissions of URLs and stores a subset of the URLs for subsequent transmission, where relative popularity is used to determine whether to store a multicast URL. An upstream proxy server capable of multicasting URLs to reporting downstream proxy servers, where the upstream proxy server interacts with the two reporting downstream proxy servers to resolve cache misses and the upstream proxy server returns a resolution to the cache misses via multicast. A proxy server protocol which includes a transaction request further including a request header, request content, and a request extension that supports multicast hit reporting and a transaction response further including a response header, response content, and a response extension which supports multicast cache pre-loading. A transaction response header which includes a popularity field indicating the popularity of a global name with respect to other global names and an expiration field indicating an expiration of the global name.