Patent ID: 7725596

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving a first request for an information object at an anycast address of a network, wherein the request is received at an information object repository selected according to specified performance metrics by executing a Web Information Locator by Distance (WILD) communication protocol that runs on top of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to map an address of a client to one or more addresses of Web caches or a content server that has a best type-of-service distance to the address of the client and to one or more addresses of redirecting Web routers that have the best type-of-service distance to the address of the client wherein the WILD protocol comprises a WILD update message for communicating mappings of client address ranges to neighboring Web routers, wherein the WILD update message comprises a basic routing update, a list of type-of-service distances from the Web caches to destinations, and a list of type-of-service distances from the redirecting Web routers to the destinations; resolving the anycast address to a corresponding unicast network address for the information object, wherein the resolving includes transmitting a second request for the corresponding unicast network address in response to the first request, awaiting an anycast resolution response to the second request for a predetermined time, and returning a failure message if the response to the second request is not received within the predetermined time, wherein the second request is a single Internet Protocol (IP) packet having the anycast network address; instructing the information object repository to obtain a copy of the information object at the corresponding unicast network address; and returning the corresponding unicast network address, if the anycast resolution response in response to the second request is received within the predetermined time, the anycast resolution response is a single IP packet having the corresponding unicast network address.