International Business Machines Corporation

United States of America as Represented by the Administrator of Nasa

David Hilton Wolpert

William Scott Spangler

Shivakumar Vaithyanathan

David Charles Martin

Mark Earl Plutowski

Kevin R Wheeler

Hansel Joseph Miranda

Distributed approach for determining a path connecting adjacent network nodes, for probabilistically or deterministically transporting an entity, with entity characteristic &mgr; from a source node to a destination node. Each node i is directly connected to an arbitrary number J(&mgr;) of nodes, labeled or numbered j&equals;j , j , . . . , jJ(&mgr;). In a deterministic version, a J(&mgr;)-component baseline proportion vector p(i;&mgr;) is associated with node i. A J(&mgr;)-component applied proportion vector p*(i;&mgr;) is determined from p(i;&mgr;) to preclude an entity visiting a node more than once. Third and fourth J(&mgr;)-component vectors, with components iteratively determined by Target(i;n(&mgr;);&mgr;) &equals;&agr;(&mgr;)&middot;Target(i;n(&mgr;)&minus;1;&mgr;) &plus;&bgr;(&mgr;)&middot;p*(i;&mgr;) and Actual(i;n(&mgr;);&mgr;) &equals;&agr;(&mgr;)&middot;Actual(i;n(&mgr;)&minus;1;&mgr;) &plus;&bgr;(&mgr;)&middot;Sent(i;j&prime;(&mgr;);n(&mgr;)&minus;1;&mgr;) , are computed, where n(&mgr;) is an entity sequence index and &agr;(&mgr;) and &bgr;(&mgr;) are selected numbers. In one embodiment, at each node i, the node j&equals;j&prime;(&mgr;) with the largest vector component difference, Target(i;n(&mgr;);&mgr;) &prime;&minus;Actual (i;n(&mgr;);&mgr;) &prime;, is chosen for the next link for entity transport, except in special &ldquo;gap&rdquo; circumstances, where the same link is optionally used for transporting consecutively arriving entities. The network nodes may be computer-controlled routers that switch collections of packets, frames, cells or other information units. Alternatively, the nodes may be waypoints for movement of physical items in a network or for transformation of a physical item. The nodes may be states of an entity undergoing state transitions, where allowed transitions are specified by the network and/or the destination node.

Masked proportional routing

Surfaid predictor: web-based system for predicting surfer behavior

Growing community of inventors

Los Gatos, CA, United States of America

David Hilton Wolpert