Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Jim Jianping Wang

Thomas D Sanfilippo

Ransom Lloyd Richardson

Thomas B Titchener

Robert A Lomme, Jr

A peer-to-peer collaboration system in which changes to a shared space may be broadcast to all of the peers in a collaboration session using messages sent with a combination of addressing techniques. Messages may be addressed for direct peer-to-peer transmission, indirect transmission through another peer or indirect transmission through a server. The type of addressing used to communicate with each peer is determined through the use of a routing table. The routing table defines interconnected groups of peers and may be used to select one or more peers in each group as the initial recipients of the message. The initial recipients may forward the message to other peers within their groups, such that all peers receive the message. For peers behind a NAT, one or more NAT traversal techniques may be used to obtain information to construct the routing table.

Peer-to-peer collaboration system with edge routing

A collaboration system using peer-to-multi-peer distribution of messages representing changes to a shared workspace. Each peer determines a distribution mechanism for messages to each of the target peers sharing the workspace. The selected distribution mechanism may depend on capabilities of a home relay associated with a peer initiating a message. Further, messages to subsets of the target peers sharing the workspace may be distributed using a session for each subset on which each message is sent only one time. The subset of target peers associated with some of the sessions may be selected so that target peers for which communication attempts have failed are grouped in the same session. In some scenarios, the initiating peer may provide multiple routing paths for target peers in a session and the home relay server may appropriately forward the message to the target peers, using one of the routing paths.

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Jim Jianping Wang