12 Nov App streaming and servers
Recently the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) sent a Notice of Allowance for this patent pending. We passed the Exam! The pending will publish as a patent in late December 2019.
Why this matters
The invention deals with Linket’s idea of 2 users with cellphones interacting with each other. One user runs a streaming app. Her phone makes a deep link that is: The app id and her temporary Internet address. The idea is that with streaming apps, the bulk of an app is often in a virtual machine in a data center. Nowadays, there might be a constellation of data centers (like AWS or Azure). The app has an app server in a data center. It could position the VMs (virtual machines) of both users’ app instances in a particular center. How the server can do this is described in the patent. Typically the server will want to minimize the interaction time between the 2 app instances. Latency (delay) should be as small as possible to enhance the UX (User Experience).
The above figure shows Jane, who has her linket [Jane]. She has an app whose streaming part sits in Jane VM in data center 1. When Bob wants to interact with her, he is at another Internet address. The app server can pick data center 2 so that if both VMs are there, this minimizes the interaction time between Jane and Bob. So her Jane VM is migrated to center 2, and Bob’s VM is made there.
Another case is where the 2 streaming apps are in the same VM. This is also discussed in the patent.
The patent goes into more details and complications. A key point is to show how Linket’s idea of a linket label that points to a deep link can be compatible with streaming apps.
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