Abstract

A system and method for avoiding internet congestion that employs a pseudo-serving mechanism that entails the use of a contract method of cooperatively sharing retained resources within the normal body of network requesters which thereby reduces the burden on heavily loaded servers and lowers both data congestion and expected user response times. Requesters, or their proxies, can elect to improve data access time by contracting for the data, whereby they warrant that they shall serve resources on a limited basis in exchange for speedier access to the data, the access to which is either granted directly, or through another pseudo-server. Congested servers thereby share their burden with the requesters constituting the burden, while requesting servers may exchange their unused bandwidth and memory resource for faster data access. Security features along with the fundamental incentives of the method allow for operation with variously uncooperative network servers. The system and method may be used with existing internet server resources and is scalable to any size network.