Obviousness

Obviousness Analysis under 35 U.S.C. § 103 for US Patent 10735320

This analysis identifies combinations of prior art that would render the independent claims of US Patent 10735320 obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) at the time of the invention (priority date October 7, 2005). The core inventive features of US10735320 revolve around identifying Layer 4 and above application flows, distributing these flows across multiple pseudowires for enhanced Quality of Service (QoS), and communicating the data without requiring modifications to intermediate Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network nodes.

Combination of Prior Art References

A combination of the following prior art references would have rendered the claims of US10735320 obvious:

1. Bryant et al., "Pseudowire Emulation Edge-to-Edge (PWE3) Architecture," Network Working Group, March 2005. This foundational document details the architecture for emulating various Layer 1 and Layer 2 services over packet-switched networks (PSNs) like MPLS using pseudowires.

2. US6430184B1 (Top Layer Networks, Inc., 2002), titled "System and process for GHIH-speed pattern matching for application-level switching of data packets." This patent discloses a system and method for identifying and switching data packets based on application-level information, typically by inspecting packet headers at Layer 4 and above.

3. US20040141393A1 (Eriksson Goran A.P., 2002), titled "Concurrent use of communication paths in a multi-path access link to an IP network." This reference teaches the concept of distributing a single communication or data flow across multiple, concurrently utilized paths within an IP network to improve performance or resilience.

4. US7050396B1 (Cisco Technology, Inc., 2006; priority 2000), titled "Method and apparatus for automatically establishing bi-directional differentiated services treatment of flows in a network." This patent describes methods for providing differentiated services (QoS) based on flow characteristics within a network, including the use of IP precedence bits and their mapping to MPLS Experimental (EXP) bits for QoS marking.

Obviousness Argument

A POSITA in network engineering, facing the challenges of providing granular QoS to modern application traffic (Layer 4 and above) over existing MPLS networks utilizing pseudowires, would have been motivated to combine the teachings of these references. The background of US10735320 itself notes that traditional Layer 1/2 pseudowire mappings often fail to guarantee QoS for individual applications generating traffic at Layer 3 or above.

1. Identifying Application Flows (Claim 1, 8, 15): Given the desire to apply application-specific QoS, a POSITA would recognize the need to identify application flows at a finer granularity than Layer 1/2. US6430184B1 provides a clear teaching for "application-level switching" by inspecting packet headers (including Layer 4 application protocol headers) to identify specific application flows. This would enable the "identifying information associated with an application flow based on one or more unencapsulated packet headers of the application flow or based on an ingress data stream that includes the application flow" as recited in the claims.

2. Determining a Plurality of Pseudowires for Distributed Mapping (Claim 1, 8, 15):

   • Pseudowire Context: The POSITA would be aware of the PWE3 architecture (Bryant et al.) as a standard for emulating services over MPLS.
   • Motivation for Distributed Mapping: US10735320's background highlights the problem where a single pseudowire with a fixed bandwidth might not meet the demands of a high-bandwidth application flow (e.g., an application requiring 70 Mbps on a 50 Mbps pseudowire), even if overall network capacity is available. To address this inefficiency and enhance bandwidth utilization or resilience, a POSITA would be motivated to distribute a single flow across multiple paths.
   • Splitting Mechanism: Eriksson (US20040141393A1) teaches the concept of "concurrent use of communication paths in a multi-path access link to an IP network" for a single connection, providing a clear precedent for splitting a data flow over multiple underlying paths. Applying this known principle of splitting a flow to pseudowires, which serve as virtual paths over an MPLS network, would be a logical step for a POSITA to efficiently handle application flows exceeding the capacity of a single pseudowire. The "stored data that maps application flows with pseudowires" for this distributed mapping would be a straightforward configuration aspect within edge network devices, as described in US10735320 with its Application Flow Table (AFT) and Pseudowire Table (PWT).

3. Communicating Data and Application-Aware QoS (Claim 1, 8, 15): Once application flows are identified (US6430184B1) and distributed across multiple pseudowires (Bryant et al. + Eriksson), a POSITA would be motivated to provide differentiated QoS based on application requirements. US7050396B1 teaches providing "differentiated services treatment of flows" and specifically mentions using IP precedence bits (which can be mapped to MPLS EXP bits) to differentiate traffic and apply QoS policies like Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) and Weighted Random Early Discard (WRED). This directly provides the motivation for US10735320's concept of assigning different parts of an application flow (e.g., critical MPEG M-frames vs. other packets) to pseudowires with higher or lower priority levels, utilizing the EXP field in the pseudowire header for service differentiation. The fact that pseudowire headers are MPLS-formatted means that intermediate MPLS nodes can process these packets as regular MPLS packets without modification, as noted by US10735320.

Thus, combining the established PWE3 architecture (Bryant et al.) with application-level flow identification (US6430184B1), the concept of splitting flows across multiple paths (Eriksson), and the motivation for providing differentiated QoS for flows (US7050396B1), a POSITA would have found it obvious to arrive at the invention claimed in US10735320. The device and computer-readable medium claims (Claims 8 and 15) are directed to implementing this obvious method using conventional network hardware and software, and therefore would also be rendered obvious.