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Networking Research Group

Inventing networking & sensing technologies

Our impact

We strive to find a balance between long term research and product impact. You may know about our research from the papers we publish and the talks we give, but we also have a broad impact on Microsoft products, such as Azure, Windows, Xbox, Office 365, and Bing.

  • Product group impact comes in many forms—consultation, design wins, code transfer, people transfer etc. Here are some examples:

    • Microsoft’s Remote Direct Memory Access Network—enabled RDMA communication between data centers in a region. It significantly improved performance and reduced cost of Azure storage.
    • Microsoft’s Wide Area Software Defined Network—implements a centralized traffic engineering system that has led to an improvement of the inter-DC WAN bandwidth utilization from 40% to 90%+, thus saving us millions of dollars annually.
    • XBOX One Wireless Controller Protocol—a high throughput, low latency, energy efficient Microsoft propriety protocol between the XBOX One console and controllers. It has won accolades of mainstream press as the best controller in the gaming marker.
    • Windows Azure Full-Bisection Bandwidth Datacenter Network—hailed as one of the most significant recent advances in computer science, our design led to an 80x improvement in dollars/Mbit/sec over previous designs. It is now the architecture of choice for all of Microsoft’s Datacenters. It enabled technologies like the highly scalable Windows Azure Flat Network Storage (opens in new tab).
    • Windows Azure Software Load Balancer—reduced cost by a factor of 15 [$60K versus $1M] by removing dependence on expensive hardware load balancers and improved cloud manageability. This fully configurable load balancer is used by both Azure and Bing.
    • Windows Firmware TPM—enabled Microsoft to offer the widely used BitLocker (opens in new tab) and DirectAccess (opens in new tab) features and a new security feature, Virtual Smart Cards, in the Windows 8 RT and Windows 8 Phone.
    • XBOX Live Service Graphs—reduced performance diagnostics in large-scale enterprise & Data Center networks from days to minutes helping meet customer SLAs. XBox Live is the first Microsoft cloud service to use this network performance diagnosis technology.
    • Windows Network Virtualization—enabled Windows to provide seamless connectivity between Microsoft’s Data Centers and customers’ on-premise networks. Our design heavily influenced the Hyper V network virtualization feature that ships in Windows Server 2012.
    • Windows Virtual Wi-Fi—enabled Windows features like range extension, concurrent corporate and guest access, and Internet gateway using a single Wi-Fi card. Before becoming a product, our prototype was downloaded several 100,000s times becoming the top three most popular MSR software download.
    • TCP for Data Center Networking—improved performance of Data Centers networks without incurring cost for expensive hardware switches. It is implemented in our core networking stack and deployed in our Data Center properties.

  • Visit www.microsoft.com/iplicensing for licensing information.

    • Wireless (Wi-Fi) Hot Spot Network Access—Package includes five technologies: Global Authentication; Network Admission; Traffic Gateway; Client Module and Policy Manager.
    • Wi-Fi Location Determination—Technology to locate a wireless client by pattern matching the measured signal strength from multiple wireless access points against a database of previously collected signal strength.
    • Cellphone Power Management—Technology that leverages the cellular radio to wake-up the Wi-Fi radio on SmartPhones, Laptops, and NetBooks.
    • Virtual WiFi—Technology that abstracts a single Wireless LAN card to appear as multiple virtual Wireless LAN cards to the user/OS.
    • Mesh Connectivity—Ad-hoc routing and link quality measurement for mesh networks as a loadable software driver.
    • Undelivered or Delayed e-mail Notification System—An alerting technology for users when e-mails sent to them have been delayed or lost.
    • High Performance Internet Connectivity in Moving Vehicles—A set of protocols, algorithms, and mechanisms that enable moving clients to transmit data packets on the wireless link that offers the fastest delivery, which minimizes application traffic delays.
    • Fast Wi-Fi Hand-off to Diversified Base Stations—Technology that opportunistically exploits base station diversity to minimize connection disruptions while supporting interactive applications for moving Wi-Fi enabled clients.
    • Smart Antenna—Low-cost directional antenna technology designed for increasing the range, throughput, and consistency of 802.11 networks.