Alastair H Wolman

7065376, Jun 20, 2006

Nov 26, 2003

10/723673

Alastair Wolman - Seattle WA, US
Atul Adya - Redmond WA, US
Paramvir Bahl - Sammamish WA, US
Jitendra D. Padhye - Kirkland WA, US
Lidong Zhou - Sunnyvale CA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

H04B 7/00

455517, 455516, 455513, 455514, 455515, 370320, 370334, 370332, 370310, 370345

An invention is disclosed whereby a wireless network node, equipped with two or more radio transceivers statically tuned to non-interfering frequency channels, can make decisions regarding which channel to use when communicating with a neighboring wireless node. A multi-radio unification protocol implemented in a wireless node coordinates the use of multiple wireless network interface cards and provides a virtual layer that hides the multiple physical network interfaces from higher layers of a node's network protocol stack. The invention is applicable to wireless networks generally, including those in which some nodes do not have multiple radios or do not recognize the multi-radio unification protocol. The invention makes possible simultaneous transmissions using available channels, thereby reducing interference and delay while increasing the overall capacity of the network.

7099689, Aug 29, 2006

Jun 30, 2003

10/610293

Paramvir Bahl - Issaquah WA, US
Atul Adya - Redmond WA, US
Alastair Wolman - Seattle WA, US
Jitendra D. Padhye - Kirkland WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

H04Q 7/20

4555521, 455522, 455572, 455574, 370338, 370345, 370466, 370400

Described herein is an implementation that reduces the battery consumption of an energy-constrained computing device that is capable of communicating over a wireless network. As conditions and circumstances warrant, the implementation selects one of multiple radios (e. g. , two)—with each having a unique combination of characteristics (in terms of power-consumption, data-rate, range and/or frequency band of operation) for wireless communications to and from a wireless device. The implementation selects one radio to minimize power-consumption while maintaining effective wireless data communication. This abstract itself is not intended to limit the scope of this patent. The scope of the present invention is pointed out in the appending claims.

7283834, Oct 16, 2007

Feb 24, 2006

11/361126

Alastair Wolman - Seattle WA, US
Atul Adya - Redmond WA, US
Paramvir Bahl - Sammamish WA, US
Jitendra D. Padhye - Kirkland WA, US
Lidong Zhou - Sunnyvale CA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

H04B 7/00

455517, 455516, 455513, 455514, 455515, 370320, 370334, 370332, 370310, 370345

An invention is disclosed whereby a wireless network node, equipped with two or more radio transceivers statically tuned to non-interfering frequency channels, can make decisions regarding which channel to use when communicating with a neighboring wireless node. A multi-radio unification protocol implemented in a wireless node coordinates the use of multiple wireless network interface cards and provides a virtual layer that hides the multiple physical network interfaces from higher layers of a node's network protocol stack. The invention is applicable to wireless networks generally, including those in which some nodes do not have multiple radios or do not recognize the multi-radio unification protocol. The invention makes possible simultaneous transmissions using available channels, thereby reducing interference and delay while increasing the overall capacity of the network.

7516049, Apr 7, 2009

Feb 28, 2007

11/680575

Brian D. Zill - Bellevue WA, US
Alastair Wolman - Seattle WA, US
Jitendra D. Padhye - Redmond WA, US
Paramvir Bahl - Sammamish WA, US
Ranveer Chandra - Kirkland WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 11/30

702186, 370241, 4554351, 709223

Wireless adapters are installed on one or more general purpose computing devices and are connected via a wireless network in an enterprise environment. The adapters are densely deployed at known locations throughout the environment and are configured as air monitors. The air monitors monitor wireless signals transmitted between transceiver devices and access points and records information about these signals. One or more analysis or inference engines may be deployed to analyze the signals received from the air monitors to obtain optimum performance and connectivity information about the wireless network.

7551552, Jun 23, 2009

Oct 17, 2003

10/686658

John Dunagan - Bellevue WA, US
Nicholas J. A. Harvey - Cambridge MA, US
Michael B. Jones - Redmond WA, US
Dejan Kostić - Durham NC, US
Marvin M. Theimer - Bellevue WA, US
Alastair Wolman - Seattle WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

H04J 1/16

370221, 370242, 370256

A guaranteed distributed failure notification method is described, wherein a failure notification (FN) facility allows applications using the facility to create FN groups to which the application associates an application state. The application registers failure handlers with the FN facility on nodes in the FN group; each failure handler is associated with a specific FN group. When, on a given node, the FN facility learns of a failure in the FN group, the facility executes the associated failure handler on that node. System failures detected by the application are signaled to other FN group members using the facility. The facility detects system failures that occur in an overlay network on which the facility is implemented, and signals a failure notification to the other FN group members.

7613796, Nov 3, 2009

Feb 3, 2003

10/356961

Nicholas J. Harvey - Redmond WA, US
Michael B. Jones - Redmond WA, US
Stefan Saroiu - Seattle WA, US
Marvin M. Theimer - Bellevue WA, US
Alastair Wolman - Seattle WA, US
Atul Adya - Bellevue WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 15/177

709220, 709221, 709222

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.

7664054, Feb 16, 2010

Mar 28, 2005

11/091641

Atul Adya - Redmond WA, US
Paramvir Bahl - Sammamish WA, US
Jitendra D. Padhye - Redmond WA, US
Alastair Wolman - Seattle WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

H04L 12/28
H04B 7/00
H04B 1/00
H04B 15/00
H04W 4/00
H04H 20/67

370255, 370338, 370334, 370339, 455 412, 455 634

Disclosed is a Neighbor Location Discovery Protocol (NLDP) that determines the relative locations of the nodes in a mesh network. In one embodiment, NLDP can be implemented for an ad-hoc wireless network where the nodes are equipped with directional antennas and are not able to use GPS. While NLDP relies on nodes having at least two RF transceivers, it offers significant advantages over previously proposed protocols that employ only one RF transceiver. In NLDP antenna hardware is simple, easy to implement, and readily available. Further, NLDP exploits the host node's ability to operate simultaneously over non-overlapping channels to quickly converge on the neighbor's location. NLDP is limited by the range of the control channel, which operates in a omni-directional fashion. However, by choosing a low frequency band, high power, and low data rate, the range of the control channel can be increased to match the range on the data channel.

7668513, Feb 23, 2010

Jun 26, 2006

11/474652

Alastair Wolman - Seattle WA, US
Brian D. Zill - Redmond WA, US
Jitendra D. Padhye - Redmond WA, US
Paramvir Bahl - Sammamish WA, US
Ranveer Chandra - Redmond WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

H04B 17/00

455 6711, 4554322, 4554351, 455450, 455411, 4554261, 455432, 370338, 370352, 370241, 709219, 709223, 709225, 702186

A framework for wireless network management applications in an enterprise environment using existing general purpose computing devices is presented. At least one of the devices is configured with a wireless adapter and is used as an AirMonitor to monitor one or more wireless networks. Other devices are configured as LandMonitors to monitor traffic on a wired network in the enterprise environment. At least one inference engine uses the LandMonitors and AirMonitors by assigning them monitoring tasks. Data from the monitoring tasks are stored in a database. Analysis of the data that is computationally intensive is generally performed by the inference engines. Wireless network management applications use the framework by installing and running application-specific components (e. g. , filters) on the AirMonitors, LandMonitors, and/or inference engines.