Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Minghua Chen

Jin Li

Philip Andrew Chou

Sudipta Sengupta

Cheng Huang

Miroslav Ponec

Ranveer Chandra

Zhengyou Zhang

Zicheng Liu

Li-wei He

Yunnan Wu

Yao Zhao

Baochun Li

A technique for resource allocation in a wireless network (for example, an access point type wireless network), which supports concurrent communication on a band of channels, is provided. The technique includes accepting connectivity information for the network that supports concurrent communication on the band of channels. A conflict graph is generated from the connectivity information. The generated conflict graph models concurrent communication on the band of channels. A linear programming approach, which incorporates information form the conflict graph and rate requirements for nodes of the network, can be utilized to maximize throughput of the network.

Load aware resource allocation in wireless networks

Described is a distributed peer-assisted multicast content delivery system (e.g., a multiparty conferencing application) that uses an adaptive link rate control protocol to discover and adapt to an arbitrary topology quickly and converge to efficient link rate allocations allowed by an underlying network. Link rates are regularly obtained and used to determine trees for sending packets to other nodes. Network coding is used to implement data multicast so that mixtures (i.e., linear combinations) of the packets are transmitted in the network. The redundant packets may be differentiated from non-redundant ('innovative') packets such that network conditions may be measured by link innovation and/or session innovation.

Multiparty real time content delivery

The described implementations relate to distributed network management and more particularly to enhancing distributed network utility. One technique selects multiple trees to distribute content to multiple receivers in a session where individual receivers can receive the distributed content at one of a plurality of rates. The technique further adjustably allocates content distribution across the multiple trees to increase a sum of utilities of the multiple receivers.

Multi-rate peer-assisted data streaming

Difficulties associated with choosing advantageous network routes between server and clients are mitigated by a routing system that is devised to use many routing path sets, where respective sets comprise a number of routing paths covering all of the clients, including through other clients. A server may then apportion a data stream among all of the routing path sets. The server may also detect the performance of the computer network while sending the data stream between clients, and may adjust the apportionment of the routing path sets including the route. The clients may also be configured to operate as servers of other data streams, such as in a videoconferencing session, for example, and may be configured to send detected route performance information along with the portions of the various data streams.

Rate-controllable peer-to-peer data stream routing

A 'code optimizer' provides various techniques for optimizing arbitrary XOR-based codes for encoding and/or decoding of data. Further, the optimization techniques enabled by the code optimizer do not depend on any underlining code structure. Therefore, the optimization techniques provided by the code optimizer are applicable to arbitrary codes with arbitrary redundancy. As such, the optimized XOR-based codes generated by the code optimizer are more flexible than specially designed codes, and allow for any desired level of fault tolerance. Typical uses of XOR-based codes include, for example, encoding and/or decoding data using redundant data packets for data transmission real-time communications systems, encoding and/or decoding operations for storage systems such as RAID arrays, etc.

Optimizing XOR-based codes

A multiple protection group (MPG) erasure-resilient coding method for constructing MPG codes for encoding and decoding data. The MPG codes constructed herein protect data chunks of data in multiple protection groups and subgroups. In general, the MPG erasure-resilient codes are constructed by locating data chunks into multiple protection groups and assigning at least one parity chunk to each protection group. Basic MPG codes are constructed from existing Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes by splitting at least some of the parity chunks into local parities for each of the multiple protection groups and projecting local parities onto each of the groups. Generalized MPG codes have a Maximally Recoverable property that can be used to determine whether an erasure pattern is recoverable or unrecoverable. Generalized MPG codes can recover any erasure pattern that is recoverable.

Erasure-resilient codes having multiple protection groups

An energy based technique to estimate the positions of people speaking from an ad hoc network of microphones. The present technique does not require accurate synchronization of the microphones. In addition, a technique to normalize the gains of the microphones based on people's speech is presented, which allows aggregation of various audio channels from the ad hoc microphone network into a single stream for audio conferencing. The technique is invariant of the speaker's volumes thus making the system easy to deploy in practice.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Minghua Chen