Marker based reporting system for hybrid content delivery network and peer to peer network

[0021]Yet a third use relates to load management within a CDN for multimedia stream delivery, and it requires a dose of background to understand. The use of a hybrid CDN-P2P system presents a unique problem for load management in a CDN. Typically, a CDN operates a request routing mechanism (e.g., a DNS infrastructure, as was described above) in order to distribute client requests for content amongst the deployed CDN servers so as to balance load, lower cost, and provide low latency to clients, among others things. The request routing mechanism relies in part on feedback from the CDN servers themselves, i.e., CDN servers continually report the load that they are experiencing. (See U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,108,703 and 7,660,896, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes.) When delivery of a multimedia stream is offloaded to a P2P network, the load reported by the CDN servers will drop. Nevertheless, the client has the option of returning to its originally assigned CDN server to get the content if and when the peers do not have the data, are not available, are farther from the client than the CDN, or for other reasons. Also, certain cont

However, this approach requires reliance on the client, and requires waiting for reports from both server and client, which take too long for load balancing purposes in a distributed computin