Patent ID: 8639744

Claim:
A method for communicating 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 traffic at the server side of the communications system, the traffic comprising a header portion and a content portion and being part of a first client session stream configured to communicate a content stream comprising the traffic to a first client over the communications path, the server side comprising a global stream model configured to maintain models of active session streams being communicated over the communications path; generating a fingerprint using byte-level information comprised by the content portion of the traffic; using the fingerprint to determine whether the traffic matches byte-level information from a second client session stream according to the global stream model, the second client session stream being an active session stream used to communicate the content stream between the server side of the communications system and at least a second client over the communications path; when the traffic matches the byte-level information from the second client session stream according to the global stream model, configuring a shared session stream to multicast at least a portion of the content stream from the server side of the communications system to the first client and the second client over the communications path; intercepting shared traffic associated with the shared session stream at the server side of the communications system; and when the shared traffic has been previously communicated to the first client according to the client stream model, compressing the shared traffic using the client stream model, and communicating the compressed shared traffic from the server side of the communications system to the first client over the communications path.