Patent ID: 7818430

Claim:
A method for retrieving erasure-coded fragments, comprising: requesting, by an assembling device using a fragment pull protocol, from a plurality of fractional-storage servers, a first quantity of erasure-coded fragments associated with one or more segments of streaming content; the first quantity of fragments is more than the minimal quantity of fragments needed for reconstructing the one or more segments, and each fragment pull request associated with a specific segment; wherein erasure-coding denotes a process in which a sequence of erasure-coded fragments are generated from a segment such that the segment can be reconstructed from essentially any subset of the erasure-coded fragments having size not smaller than the size of the segment; wherein each fractional-storage server configured to store at least one erasure-coded fragment but less than the minimum amount of fragments or data required to reconstruct the segments; receiving as a response, by the assembling device from at least two of the fractional-storage servers, a second decodable quantity of fragments usable for reconstructing the one or more segments; whereby the second quantity of fragments equals or lower than the first quantity due to a failure condition; and repeating the step of requesting the fragments such that significantly more fragments associated with segments belonging to the beginning of the content are requested before fragments associated with segments belonging to the ending of the content.