MIT Assigned Patent

Massuchusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, has been assigned a patent (9,165,013) developed by Medard, Muriel, Deb, Supratim, Cambridge, MA, and Koetter, Ralf, Champaign, IL, for a “random linear coding approach to distributed data storage.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A method and computer program product for providing a random linear coding approach to distributed data storage is presented. A file is broken into a plurality of pieces. For every peer, peer means storage-location with limited storage space, the number of coded-pieces the peer can store is determined. Each of the coded-piece is determined by taking random linear combination of all the pieces of the entire file. The associate code-vector is stored for every coded-piece. The file is retrieved by collecting code-vectors and the coded-pieces from the peers and viewing the collected code-vectors as a matrix. When a dimension of the matrix is equal to the number of pieces of the file, the file is recovered using the collection of code vectors in the matrix.“

The patent application was filed on November 16, 2012 (13/678,982).