Patent ID: 7783777

Claim:
A system, comprising: a plurality of devices implementing a plurality of peer nodes coupled to a network, wherein each of the plurality of devices implements at least one peer node; at least one of the plurality of peer nodes, wherein each of the at least one of the plurality of peer nodes is configured as a publisher peer node for a plurality of contents cached on the respective peer node, wherein each publisher peer node is configured to publish one or more advertisements on the network, wherein each advertisement corresponds to a specific one of the plurality of contents cached on the peer node, and wherein each advertisement includes information for requesting the specific corresponding content; wherein to publish the one or more advertisements on the network the publisher peer node is configured to send the one or more advertisements to a rendezvous peer node, wherein the rendezvous peer node caches the one or more advertisements; and at least a subset of the plurality of peer nodes, wherein each peer node in the subset is configured to: discover published advertisements on the network from the rendezvous peer node by accessing the rendezvous peer node, wherein the published advertisements include two or more advertisements published by two or more content publisher peer nodes to advertise a particular content cached on each of the two or more content publisher peer nodes; determine one of the two or more content publisher peer nodes as logically nearest on the network, wherein a logically nearest peer node is a peer node to which communications over the network take the least time; request one or more specific contents each corresponding to one of the discovered advertisements in accordance with the information included in the respective advertisements; and request the particular content from the logically nearest content publisher peer node in accordance with the advertisement corresponding to the logically nearest content publisher peer node; wherein a publisher peer node that caches a content corresponding to a discovered advertisement is configured to provide the content corresponding to the discovered advertisement to a requesting peer node in response to a request for the content from the requesting peer node; and wherein the requesting peer node is configured to cache the content and become an additional content publisher peer node for the content corresponding to the discovered advertisement.