Abstract

Background: Many large software systems composed of lots of files are expected to offer customers 24/7 services. On the other hand, periodic and frequent updates are forced to fix any bugs and generate several revisions. Therefore, how to manage the revisions without human intervention is challenging. The aims of this paper are to introduce readers to one versioning-based acceleration method for software online upgrade, to discuss the details of versioning-based upgrade and download acceleration, and review some recent patents on software online upgrade.

Methods: This paper describes Patent Publication Number CN102868731A, titled "Method and appliance for software online upgrade and downloading acceleration", issued by State Intellectual Property Office of the P.R.C. on January 9, 2013. The patent is based on versioning-based acceleration method for software online upgrade. First, client computer system requests distributed hash table (DHT) nodes to obtain update resources. Second, DHT node discovers resource seeds (version control server) or peers (client systems). Finally, resource seeds send the client a list of applicable updates.

Results: Versioning-based upgrade and download acceleration are proposed to address the issue of software online upgrade. DHT algorithm is used to accelerate the download process and manage the update contents using version control tools. As a result of P2P network, the update process runs smoothly under single node failure. Although there is room for improvement of this method, the current applicability has been illustrated by efficiently solving software online upgrade problems.

Conclusion: The idea and a disclosed embodiment of a patent (Patent CN102868731A, issued by State Intellectual Property Office of the P.R.C.) are presented, which is based on versioning-based acceleration method for software online upgrade. It includes receiving software updates at groups of distributed hash table (DHT) nodes, finding resource seeds (version control server) or peers (client systems), sending the client a list of applicable updates from resource seeds or peers.

Keywords: Software online upgrade, version control, distributed hash table, peer-to-peer network.