Patent ID: 11877025
Assignee: CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS OPERATING, LLC
Field: Audio-visual technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 0:
1. A content delivery network (CDN) for delivering content items in a content delivery system, the CDN comprising:
one or more user equipment gateways, each UE gateway configured to be connected to one or more UEs;
a service switch mesh network comprising two or more levels, each level comprising one or more service switches, wherein each UE gateway is connected to a service switch in a first level of the SS mesh network; and
one or more server gateways, each server gateway configured to be connected to one or more content servers, wherein each server gateway is connected to a service switch in a last level of the SS mesh network, wherein:
each UE gateway, service switch, and server gateway is a CDN node of the CDN network;
each UE, CDN node, and content server is a system node of the content delivery system;
a CDN node is configured to maintain a cache list of mappings, each mapping identifying a corresponding upstream system node for a content item available at a corresponding content server of the content delivery system; and
the CDN node is configured to receive an upstream service instance request for a specific content item by a corresponding UE and, upon determining that a mapping for the specific content item is in its cache list, forward the upstream service instance request to the corresponding upstream system node as part of a process of defining a downstream data path for the specific content item from the corresponding content server to the corresponding UE.