6.1 A Transport System for Application Acceleration The transport system for Akamai‘s application delivery network relies on the use of Akamai‘s highly distributed edge servers as a high-performance overlay network that makes wide-area Internet communications faster and more reliable. In particular, the communications between any two Akamai servers can be optimized to overcome the inefficiencies we discussed in Section 3 through a number of techniques including path optimization and protocol enhancements. This transport system is applicable to many types of situations accelerating non-cacheable customer content and applications, retrieving content (or performing freshness checks) from the Figure 4: With real-time path optimization, Akamai helps customers avoid connectivity problems such as those depicted here,
