Patent ID: 7339937

Claim:
A method for directing packets of data based on their content in a telecommunications network, wherein the physical network comprises a plurality of clients, a plurality of servers for supplying content and a plurality of content aware routers for directing communications over the network and wherein content represents the payload carried in the packets; the method comprising: providing a content intelligent overlay network that is a Virtual Content Network (VCN) created on top of the physical network; using the overlay network and a digest of the content to select a preferred path for the packets and the physical network layer is used to transfer the packets from one end to other end of the path: arranging the Virtual Content Network (VCN) to act as a distributed virtual content router and so as to be transparent to the users; forming the VCN by content edge routers (CERs) placed at the edge and the content switching routers (CSRs) in the core of the VCN; arranging the VCN to be sparser than the underlying physical network; connecting the CERs and CSRs using logical content switching paths (CSPs); grouping together all contents hosted by the VCN with similar characteristics to create sets referred to as Content-Equivalence Class (CEC) in which the CECs allow handling of large volumes of data by creating content aggregates; wherein the method further comprises the steps: (a) identifying and describing content attributes where the attributes are classified as structural and semantical attributes of the contents and the attributes are used to characterize and classify the contents hosted by the VCN and create the CECs for these contents and where all CECs are unique within the VCN i.e. each CEC will have a unique set of attribute values; (b) implementing a tagging function to create a fixed sized content-derived tag that is used to identify each CEC where the tag is derived based on the attribute values of each CEC and each tag is unique within the VCN and is used to route packets within the VCN; and (c) disseminating the tags within the VCN either at periodic intervals or on-demand.