Content Category Cache for Gateway Filtering
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current content filtering systems in communication networks face inefficiencies in categorizing and filtering content due to vendor-specific categorizations, leading to inconsistent and less efficient access control across different vendors.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a content services gateway with a content category cache that uses generic categorization to map content identifiers to generic categories, allowing for efficient filtering and access control by maintaining mappings for frequently requested content and utilizing a content filtering engine to provide vendor-agnostic categorization.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If vendor-specific categorization is used for content filtering, then each vendor can maintain its own categorization standards, but the system becomes complex and inconsistent across different vendors
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a content category cache as an intermediary layer between the content filtering engine and the gateway. This cache stores pre-computed content category mappings that translate vendor-specific categorizations into a unified format, allowing the system to support multiple vendor standards without directly processing each vendor's specific categorization logic at the gateway level, thus reducing system complexity while maintaining adaptability
Solution Approach 2:
The content category cache serves multiple functions: it stores content category mappings, caches filtering results, and provides a unified interface for different vendor categorizations. By making this component multi-functional, the system can handle various vendor-specific categorizations through a single universal mechanism, reducing the need for separate handling logic for each vendor and thereby reducing overall system complexity
2Productivity
If content category mappings are stored at the gateway on the data path, then filtering efficiency is improved through caching, but memory resources at the gateway are consumed
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements local quality by storing content category mappings specifically at the gateway where they are most needed for filtering decisions. Rather than distributing cache uniformly across the system or storing all possible mappings, the gateway maintains a localized cache with the specific mappings required for its filtering operations, optimizing the balance between filtering efficiency and memory resource consumption at this critical point in the data path
3Reliability
If a content category cache is maintained at the gateway, then access control consistency is improved, but the gateway requires additional processing overhead
Solution Approach 1:
The content category mappings are pre-computed and stored in the content category cache before filtering operations are performed. This preliminary preparation of categorization data allows the gateway to perform filtering decisions by simply looking up pre-computed mappings rather than performing complex categorization analysis in real-time, thereby improving access control consistency while minimizing the processing overhead during actual filtering operations
Data Source
AI summary
Maintaining a content category cache includes storing the content category cache at a gateway. The content category cache includes content category mappings, where a content category mapping associates content with one or more categories describing the content. A request requesting content for a user is received. One or more categories associated with the requested content are determined from a content category mapping of the content category cache. The requested content is filtered in accordance with the categories.