1.6 Applicability Statement
The Retrieval Protocol is designed to handle the content availability query and content retrieval parts of the operation. It is also suitable for other types of content or object retrieval tasks because it does not assume any characteristics of the content.
The Peer Content Caching and Retrieval Framework, which uses the Retrieval Protocol, is best suited when there is a need to reduce load on a content server or reduce bandwidth usage on the link between the peers and the content server. This is because the protocol enables downloading data from peers on the high-speed link instead of the content server, which might be behind a slow link or might be heavily loaded.