Patent ID: 8489673

Claim:
A method for pre-positioning content over a communications system having a communications path between a server side of the communications system and a plurality of clients, the communications path comprising a shared forward link over which bandwidth resources are shared during a multicast communication, the method comprising: intercepting a data block at the server side of the communications system, the data block comprising a header portion and a content portion and being communicated as part of a content set over the communications path, the content set comprising a plurality of content objects and being identified by a content set identifier, the content set identifier being associated with a set-level profile characterizing the content set; associating the data block with the content set identifier; generating a fingerprint using byte-level information comprised by the content portion of the data block; generating an anticipatory content value (ACV) metric at least partially according to the set-level profile associated with the content set identifier by estimating a future compression gain achieved by pre-positioning the content set in anticipation of estimated future requests for the content set as a function of a percentage of the content set anticipated to change in relation to the estimated future requests for the content set, the future compression gain being estimated according to the set-level profile associated with the content set identifier, such that the ACV metric is functionally related to the future compression gain; determining whether to anticipatorily pre-position the content set over the communications path according to the ACV metric; and when it is determined to anticipatorily pre-position the content set over the communications path according to the ACV metric, determining whether to multicast the data block over the communications path to a client of the plurality of clients according to the fingerprint.