Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Nicholas J Harvey

Jeffrey Bruce Parham

William Birkin Lees

Levon A Esibov

Marvin Michael Theimer

Alastair Wolman

Atul Adya

Stefan Saroiu

Michael B Jones

Laszlo Lovasz

A system and method for identifying network endpoints that provide a service of interest orders endpoints according to their network proximity to a requesting client. The requesting client may then contact the closest available providing endpoint, thus increasing the efficiency of usage of network resources while decreasing latency and enhancing reliability. In an embodiment of the invention, when a connection to the nearest providing endpoint cannot be established, a mechanism for locating a next-closest alternative endpoint is provided.

Generalized proximity service

A system and method for using skip nets to build and maintain overlay networks for peer-to-peer systems. A skip net is a distributed data structure that can be used to avoid some of the disadvantages of distributed hash tables by organizing data by key ordering. Skip nets can use logarithmic state per node and probabilistically support searches, insertions and deletions in logarithmic time.

System and method for creating improved overlay network with an efficient distributed data structure

A method of finding an optimal match between clients and servers under given matching constraints utilizes a bipartite diagram in which the clients are presented as vertices on one side, the servers as vertices on the other side, and each possible client-server pairing allowed under the matching constraints as an edge connecting the vertices representing the client and the server. After an initial round of assignments is performed, the assignments are optimized by an optimization operation that iteratively applies a reassignment process. The reassignment process searches for a chain of servers starting with a server having a highest number of clients and ends with another server with a client number less than that of the first server by at least two, with each server in the chain except the end server having a client reassignable to the next server in the chain. Those reassignable clients are then reassigned along the chain such that the first server's client number is reduced by one and the end server's client number is reduced by one. The reassignment process is repeated until an optimal match is reached.

Method and system for matching network clients and servers under matching constraints

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Nicholas J Harvey