Patent ID: 8874774

Claim:
A distributed system comprising: fractional-storage CDN servers configured to store erasure-coded fragments associated with segments of streaming contents; each fractional-storage CDN server further configured to deliver fragments, essentially concurrently, at a certain fragment delivery throughput, to a plurality of assembling devices as replies to fragment pull protocol requests by the plurality of assembling devices, each fragment pull protocol request associated with a specific segment; the a total outgoing bandwidth of the fractional-storage CDN servers divided by a number of the fractional-storage CDN servers is at least 100 times a total outgoing bandwidth of the plurality of assembling devices divided by a number of the plurality of assembling devices; each fractional-storage CDN server further configured to store less than a minimum amount of erasure-coded fragments needed to decode the stored erasure-coded fragments; wherein a reduction in the certain fragment delivery throughput of one of the fractional-storage CDN servers triggers a process in which other fractional-storage CDN servers increase their certain fragment delivery throughput as a reaction to the fragment pull protocol requests, to compensate for the reduced certain fragment delivery throughput; and wherein the increased certain fragment delivery throughput on each of the other fractional-storage CDN servers as the reaction to the fragment pull protocol requests from a single assembling device is smaller than the certain fragent delivery throughput at which the fractional-storage CDN server already serves the plurality of devices with the erasure-coded fragments.