US 5440719

I'll search for details on this specific patent and check for any litigation records.

Let me check for litigation records and claim text.

Let me look for the claim text specifically.

Search Results Summary — US Patent 5,440,719

Verification note on scope: I searched for this specific patent number. All hits I could confirm relate to US 5,440,719 (Hanes et al.). I found no CAFC 2026 docket, no district court litigation, and no IPR/PGR proceeding involving US 5,440,719. Note that a large volume of unrelated noise appears for the bare string "5440719" (e.g., a Beyond Meat insider-trading share count, a Florida LLC's FEI number, and Japanese Patent No. 5440719 — a Toyota reactor patent). None of those are this US patent. I could not confirm any 2026 appellate activity, and I state that as an absence of evidence, not proof of absence.

Bibliographic Data (from the authoritative Google Patents record)

Minor discrepancy to flag: Google Patents lists Cadence Design Systems, Inc. as the original assignee, while the recorded assignment history shows an assignment to Comdisco Systems, Inc. in January 1993 followed by reassignment back to Cadence in April 1995. The BONeS®/ATG products referenced in the specification were Comdisco products, which is consistent with the Comdisco link. I am not asserting which entity held rights at filing.

Abstract (verbatim)

"A method for modeling traffic on a network according to a Client/Server paradigm is disclosed. The method includes the steps of interacting the model parameters from known or measured interactions between a client node running a particular application and a server node with no other activity on the network. The method is repeated for each nodal configuration and for each application until the traffic for each node-application combination has been modeled with no other load on the network. Scripts are created from the paradigm parameters and are used in conjunction with a traffic generator to create discrete events mimicking the traffic which would be generated from each node. The model will insure that the traffic generated by each traffic source will be adjusted as a function of the response of the network under the load created by all of the traffic loading the network."

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims — with an explicit uncertainty caveat

Caveat: The full text supplied to me (the Google Patents narrative) reproduces the specification, background, summary, drawings list, and detailed description, but does not include the literal "Claims" section, and my searches did not surface verified claim language. I therefore cannot quote or reliably paraphrase the exact independent claim limitations. What follows is an overview of the inventive concept as claimed, inferred from the specification and abstract, and should be confirmed against the USPTO/Google Patents claims pane before being relied on.

Based on the specification, the independent claim(s) are directed to a computer-implemented method for simulating data traffic on a network and would typically recite:

1. Modeling a client node's traffic as a request/response conversation — characterizing the traffic between a client node running a particular application and a server node using four parameters: Client Waiting Time, Client Request Size, Server Response Time, and Server Response Size (the "Client/Server Paradigm," FIG. 7).

2. Deriving those parameters from an isolated baseline — obtaining them from known characteristics or from an analyzer trace of a real client/server interaction recorded with no other client nodes accessing the server (FIG. 9 procedure), including stripping protocol overhead (e.g., 34 bytes for 10-Base-T/IPX) and recombining fragmented sub-messages so the parameters reflect the application-layer message.

3. Generating discrete simulation events from the parameters — converting the four parameters into a script (e.g., ATG script with Thinking Time, CPU access time, byte-to-bit conversions, forced-step timeout, RESTART step) that drives a traffic generator to produce events mimicking the recorded traffic (FIGS. 11, 14a, 14b).

4. Simulating the network model with feedback — exercising the network resource models with those events, where the generation of a next correlated client request is conditioned on (a) receipt of the corresponding server response and (b) satisfaction of the Client Waiting Time, so that as the simulated network load slows system response, the traffic sources automatically stretch their inter-request timing — i.e., load-dependent traffic feedback (FIG. 13).

5. Scaling to multiple nodes — replicating the traffic-source model for additional identical client nodes to predict network performance as node count, resources, or applications change.

Likely dependent claims would address: the specific four-parameter set, network-analyzer trace capture, overhead subtraction, sub-message recombination, the script/traffic-generator conversion, and application to distributed processing systems (shared-bus transactions).

Key Takeaways / Confidence

• High confidence: patent number, title (literal rendering), application number, filing/issue dates, inventors, assignee record, legal status, and family members — all corroborated across the Google Patents record, USPTO.report, and multiple citing documents.
• High confidence: the abstract, specification content, and the Client/Server Paradigm concept.
• Low confidence / unverified: the exact wording and count of the independent claims, because the literal claim text was not present in the supplied materials and did not surface in search. I recommend pulling the claims directly from the USPTO PatentCenter or the Google Patents "Claims" tab.
• No evidence found of any 2026 CAFC docket or other litigation/PTAB activity for this patent; the patent is long expired.

Sources: Google Patents US5440719A, USPTO.report grant/5440719, EP0895375A3 search report showing family link.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 5440719.

Let me search more targeted sources for this specific patent number.

Let me do a few more targeted searches to be thorough.

Litigation Search Results: U.S. Patent No. 5,440,719

Bottom line

I found no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 5,440,719 in any of the sources searched. No district court case, no CAFC appeal, no PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM), and no ITC investigation referencing this patent number was identified.

To be explicit about the rule you gave me: I did not find results for similar-looking but different numbers (e.g., the Japanese patent JP 5440719 B2, a Toyota reactor patent; the Florida FEI number 47-5440719; or the Canadian obituary listing 5440719) and I have excluded those as non-responsive. Nothing returned was a U.S. patent litigation match.

Search coverage

I searched for the patent number in combination with litigation terms and checked results surfacing from Unified Patents' litigation portal, CourtListener, Docket Alarm/Justia dockets, RPX Insight, and general litigation coverage. The only relevant hit tying the identifier to this patent was its own patent-family/classification data (e.g., the EP 0 595 440 A3 family-member table listing US 5,440,719 A as the U.S. member of EP 0595440) — that is a family relationship, not litigation.

Patent context (relevant to why no litigation surfaced)

• Patent: US 5,440,719 A — "Method simulating data traffic on network in accordance with a client/sewer [server] paradigm" (per the Google Patents title as fetched; note the apparent typo in the source title).
• Inventors: Charles F. Hanes; Colin K. Mick.
• Original/current assignee: Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (originally assigned to Comdisco Systems, Inc. in 1993, then to Cadence in 1995).
• Filing date / priority: October 27, 1992.
• Grant date: August 8, 1995.
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration October 27, 2012 (per Google Patents).
• Technical field: network simulation / discrete-event simulation of client-server data traffic (classifications G06F 11/34xx, H04L 43/00).

Because the patent expired in 2012, there is a structural reason it is unlikely to appear in recent NPE or infringement campaigns, and none appeared in the sources searched.

Caveats and limitations

1. Not a substitute for a full professional search. My search was web-based and did not include exhaustive, paid database coverage (e.g., full Docket Navigator, Lexis CourtLink, Westlaw KeyCite/Litigation History, or full PACER/CAFC docket sweeps). A litigation-search report of the type the USPTO's CRU prepares for reexaminations would be the definitive check.
2. CourtListener/PACER coverage limits. These databases are strong on federal district court patent dockets but not perfectly complete, particularly for older matters or where the patent was mentioned only in an exhibit.
3. Confidence: I am reasonably confident there is no well-known or reported litigation on this patent, but I cannot state with certainty that no case ever mentioned it, given the coverage gaps above.

Recommended next steps if you need certainty

• Request a KeyCite / Litigation History report on U.S. 5,440,719 (Westlaw) and a CourtLink docket search (Lexis).
• Run a full PACER and CAFC docket search by the patent number.
• Search the Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) and RPX Insight by the patent number directly.
• Check USPTO Patent Center / Global Dossier and the file history for any prior reexamination (90/...) or AIA review referencing it.

If the answer is simply "no litigation is known," that is what the current evidence supports — and I am stating that explicitly rather than inferring or fabricating a case.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — 0 active, 0 with claims canceled, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 5,440,719, and my independent web searches surfaced none (the only hits tying "5,440,719" to PTAB dockets are citations of this patent as prior art inside petitions against other patents — e.g., it appears as reference "A18" in the prosecution-file exhibit of IPR2019-01002 against U.S. Pat. No. 8,135,843). Bottom line for a defendant: there is no IPR/PGR/CBM kill-shot on this patent, but you almost certainly don't need one — the patent expired 2012-10-27, so any assertion today is a damages-free zombie claim.

No proceedings to report

There is no proceeding to enumerate. The structured PTAB block is empty, and nothing in the public record contradicts it. Two structural reasons explain the absence, and both matter for your defensive posture:

• The IPR window barely existed. IPR became available under the AIA on 2012-09-16. This patent's 20-year term from the 1992-10-27 priority/filing date ran out on 2012-10-27 — roughly six weeks later. Any petitioner would have had to file within a ~6-week window against a patent with no remaining damages life worth attacking. Petitioners do occasionally challenge expired patents (to clear a § 315(e)(2) estoppel benefit or a related family member), but there was essentially no economic upside here.
• PGR and CBM were unavailable anyway. PGR under § 321 applies only to patents with a claim with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16 — this patent was filed in 1992, so PGR is categorically off the table. CBM review (sunset 2020-09-16) applies only to patents claimed to be directed to a financial product or service; US 5,440,719 claims a network-traffic simulation method (Client/Server Paradigm modeling), not a financial process, so CBM eligibility would have been a losing argument.

No judge panels, institution decisions, final written decisions, settlements, or Federal Circuit appeals exist to report for this patent. I will not invent any.

Strategic summary

Claim status: every claim is UNTESTED at the PTAB, and all are EXPIRED. No claim of US 5,440,719 has ever been canceled, confirmed, or construed in any AIA trial. That is not the same as "hardened" — it means the patent's validity has simply never been put to the Board. What is established is the term: the ODP data shows anticipated expiration on 2012-10-27, and the record shows a security interest recorded to Credit Lyonais (1996) and released (1998), with the patent marked Expired – Lifetime. An expired patent can still be asserted for past infringement, but the recovery math is dispositive.

Estoppel landscape: irrelevant, because there is no petitioner to estop. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only after a final written decision. With zero proceedings, there is no petitioner, no privy, and no estoppel bar on anyone. Conversely, there is also no FWD you can cite offensively, and no PTAB record to point a district court to for a § 315/§ 325 stay. If you are accused today, your validity challenge would have to be run from scratch in court (or in an ex parte reexamination, which is even available to you as a defendant under § 302 — and is arguably attractive here given the age of the art). The prior-art space for a simulation-methodology patent from 1992 is broad: the specification itself concedes the field, citing the BONeS® product and its manuals (Comdisco Systems, Inc., incorporated by reference), the Network General "Sniffer" product line and its manuals (also incorporated by reference), the ISO OSI model (ISO 7498-1984), and the Comdisco "PlanNer Application Traffic Generator Module (ATG)." Those incorporated-by-reference publications are prior art and are fair game in any forum.

Pattern signals: none. No repeat petitioner, no patent-owner appeal activity, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) in the chain. The only post-grant activity in the ODP record is administrative: assignments (Comdisco Systems → Cadence Design Systems, 1995-04-03), a security interest and its release, and expiration. Cadence Design Systems remains the current assignee in the ODP listing, though the ODP data carries the standard caveat that assignee listings may be inaccurate — verify current ownership (and chain of title through the Comdisco→Cadence assignment) before responding to any demand.

Recommended next steps

• No PTAB activity exists — say so plainly, and shift the defense. The absence is not a signal that the patent is strong; it is a signal that the patent is old enough that nobody bothered. Do not build a defense around an IPR-based stay or an FWD. Build it around the calendar.
• Run the damages cutoff first. The patent expired 2012-10-27. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, a plaintiff filing suit now (2026) can recover damages only for infringement occurring within the six years preceding the complaint — a window (roughly 2020–2026) that falls entirely after expiration. On its face there is no recoverable damages period. Confirm this with the exact expiration date of record (including any terminal disclaimer, § 154(b) adjustment, or maintenance-fee lapse/expiration history) before relying on it in a demand-letter response.
• If a pre-2013 damages theory is floated, attack the priority and term. Verify the expiration date against the actual chain: this patent's U.S. term runs from the 1992-10-27 filing, and the corresponding EP 0 595 440 B1/CA 2,107,141/JP 3090388 family dates (1993 foreign filings, EP grant 1999) confirm the vintage. There is no post-2012 continuation or reissue in the record cited here that could extend exclusivity.
• Preserve the § 102/§ 103 record now, and keep it in a single forum. With no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to navigate, you are free to raise any ground anywhere — in district court, in an ex parte reexamination you file under § 302, or both (subject to the new October 2025 proposed rules restricting parallel IPR challenges; note those apply only to IPR, not to ex parte reexam). The specification's own admissions and incorporated-by-reference Comdisco/BONeS/ATG/Sniffer materials are the most efficient starting point for an anticipation or obviousness position.
• No CAFC docket to check. There is no FWD, so no appeal, no CourtListener docket, and no Federal Circuit disposition for this patent. If someone hands you a proceeding number for a "5,440,719 IPR" or a "Cadence v. [X]" appeal asserting this patent, treat it as a likely confusion with a different Cadence patent (Cadence holds a large portfolio, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 7,673,259 and others) and verify the number against PTAB E2E before relying on it.

Caveat on sourcing: the proceeding list is drawn from the USPTO ODP structured block. ODP ingest can lag, so if a specific proceeding number is presented to you, verify it directly in PTAB E2E and the PTAB Decisions database rather than relying on the negative result here. I found no such proceeding, and I am not aware of one with high confidence.

I'll reconstruct the assignment record for US 5,440,719. Let me search the USPTO assignment records and related sources.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US Patent 5,440,719

Sourcing note up front (read before relying on any line below). I attempted to retrieve the recorded-assignment detail (reel/frame, conveyance, correspondent of record) from the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) and the legacy Assignment Search (assignment.uspto.gov). Within this session's search budget, neither the Assignment Center detail pages nor the reel/frame numbers nor the correspondent-of-record fields were retrievable. What I can verify comes from the Google Patents legal-events log, which is itself derived from USPTO assignment data — so I can confirm that four assignment-family events exist and their recorded dates, but I cannot cite reel/frame numbers or correspondents, and I will not fabricate them. Every reel/frame and correspondent field below is marked accordingly. Treat this section as date-certain and reel/frame-blank, and pull the actual numbers from Assignment Center before using them in any filing.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: I found no evidence that either inventor departed the assignee within 12 months of filing, and none that a departure preceded any transfer. Not determinable from the sources retrieved — but note that the only recorded inventor-side assignment in the log names Hanes alone, not Mick.

Flag — incomplete inventor-assignment record. The 1993-01-21 event lists the assignor literally as "HANES, CHARLES" only. A patent with two named inventors would ordinarily have two assignment instruments (or one joint instrument naming both). Either (a) the Google Patents event rendering is truncated, (b) Mick's interest was conveyed under a separate reel/frame not surfaced here, or (c) Mick was under a pre-existing employment/obligation-to-assign. This must be resolved against Assignment Center — it bears on whether Comdisco (and thus Cadence) ever acquired complete title to the Mick interest. I state the ambiguity rather than resolve it.

Original assignee

Entity named on the issued patent: Cadence Design Systems, Inc. is listed by Google Patents as both original and current assignee, but the recorded chain shows the original assignee was Comdisco Systems, Inc. (1993-01-21), reassigned to Cadence in 1995-04-03. This is the same rendering discrepancy flagged in the earlier Patent-summary and Prior-art sections; it is a Google Patents artifact, not a title dispute.

• Comdisco Systems, Inc. — subsidiary of Comdisco, Inc. (Rosemont, Illinois), a computer-leasing and technology-services conglomerate. Comdisco Systems built and sold the BONeS® block-oriented network simulator and the PlanNer ATG traffic generator — i.e., it shipped a commercial product embodying the claimed subject matter (the specification incorporates the BONeS® and ATG manuals by reference). Status: the BONeS/Comdisco Systems business was acquired by Cadence Design Systems (recorded assignment 1995-04-03). Hedged context: Comdisco, Inc. (the parent) filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2001 — ~6 years after this patent left the Comdisco orbit, so this patent was not part of any Comdisco bankruptcy estate. I flag the parent's later insolvency only to pre-empt a false "bankruptcy fire-sale" inference. (Confidence on the 2001 parent Chapter 11: moderate; verify before citing.)
• Cadence Design Systems, Inc. — operating company, primary line of business electronic design automation (EDA) software and hardware for IC/system design; publicly traded (NASDAQ: CDNS); still operating. Cadence commercialized the acquired BONeS simulation line and then exited that business. No evidence Cadence ever asserted this patent.

Assignment timeline

All four events below are drawn from the Google Patents legal-events log. Dates are the dates as recorded in that log (Google Patents entries typically reflect the recording date, which can lag the execution date by weeks or months — treat execution dates as approximate). Reel/frame and correspondent are NOT RETRIEVABLE in this session and are shown as such.

1. 1992-10-27 (filing) → recorded 1993-01-21 — Reel NNNNNN/NNNN — NOT RETRIEVABLE

   • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest
   • Assignor: HANES, CHARLES (rendering shows Hanes only — see inventor flag; Mick not shown)
   • Assignee: COMDISCO SYSTEMS, INC.
   • Correspondent: NOT RETRIEVABLE — cannot assess recurrence.
   • Context: Founding assignment — inventor(s) convey interest to the employer/developer of the BONeS product at (or shortly after) filing.

2. recorded 1995-04-03 — Reel NNNNNN/NNNN — NOT RETRIEVABLE

   • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest (recorded note: "SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS")
   • Assignor: COMDISCO SYSTEMS, INC.
   • Assignee: CADENCE DESIGN SYSTEMS, INC.
   • Correspondent: NOT RETRIEVABLE — cannot assess recurrence.
   • Context: Acquisition (corporate M&A) — Cadence acquired the Comdisco Systems business and took the patent portfolio with it. Not a fire-sale and not a transfer to an asserter.

3. recorded 1996-05-06 — Reel NNNNNN/NNNN — NOT RETRIEVABLE

   • Conveyance: Security Interest (recorded note: "SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS") — not an ownership transfer
   • Assignor: CADENCE DESIGN SYSTEMS, INC.
   • Assignee/Lender: CREDIT LYONNAIS, NEW YORK BRANCH, AS AGENT
   • Correspondent: NOT RETRIEVABLE — cannot assess recurrence.
   • Context: Securitization / secured financing — the patent pledged as collateral under a credit facility (Credit Lyonnais acting as collateral agent for lenders). Title did not move.

4. recorded 1998-10-14 — Reel NNNNNN/NNNN — NOT RETRIEVABLE

   • Conveyance: Release (Release of Patent Security Interest) — not an ownership transfer
   • Assignor: CREDIT LYONNAIS, ACTING THROUGH ITS NEW YORK BRANCH, AS AGENT
   • Assignee: CADENCE DESIGN SYSTEMS, INC.
   • Correspondent: NOT RETRIEVABLE — cannot assess recurrence.
   • Context: Securitization release — lien discharged; Cadence restored to unencumbered ownership.

Post-1998: No further ownership or security assignments appear. The patent is Expired – Lifetime, anticipated expiration 2012-10-27 (20-year term from the 1992-10-27 filing). Current owner of record: Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

Bottom line of this section: the chain contains no assignment after 1995 and no NPE/shell/licensing entity at any point. The only non-ownership events are a bank security interest and its release.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5440719
    1992 : Filed 1992-10-27 by Hanes and Mick
    1993 : Assigned to Comdisco Systems
         : Recorded 1993-01-21
    1995 : Acquired by Cadence Design Systems
         : Recorded 1995-04-03
    1996 : Security interest to Credit Lyonnais
         : Recorded 1996-05-06
    1998 : Lien released to Cadence
         : Recorded 1998-10-14
    2012 : Patent term expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Operating-company assertion — but with the "assertion" prong expressly NOT met, and that caveat is material.

Justification (2–3 sentences): The entire recorded chain (1992-10-27 filing → Comdisco Systems assignment recorded 1993-01-21 → Cadence acquisition recorded 1995-04-03 → Credit Lyonnais security interest 1996-05-06 → lien release 1998-10-14) runs inventors → operating company → operating acquirer → bank lien → release, with no licensing LLC, no known asserter, and no post-1995 transfer — so every NPE/troll signal is not present. The current owner of record is Cadence Design Systems, Inc., a real operating EDA company that commercialized the claimed simulation technology (BONeS/ATG), which places this patent in the operating-company bucket rather than the NPE bucket. The honest caveat: "assertion" never occurred — the patent is long expired (2012-10-27) and, per the Litigation and PTAB sections, has never been litigated or challenged; so this is an operating-company-owned, non-asserted patent, not an operating-company campaign. The verdict label is dictated by the forced choice set; the substantive finding is no NPE chain, no assertion, expired.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center — search by patent 5440719 (and the indexed mirror, assignment.uspto.gov). Pull the reel/frame numbers and the correspondent-of-record for the four entries above before relying on this in any filing — those two fields are the only material gaps in this reconstruction, and the correspondent field is the one that would let you test the repeat-player signal (Signal 3).

Confidence summary

• High confidence: the four legal events, their recorded dates, conveyance types (assignment / acquisition / security interest / release), assignor and assignee identities, current owner (Cadence), and the absence of any NPE-named assignee.
• Moderate confidence: Comdisco, Inc. parent-level 2001 Chapter 11 (context only; does not affect this patent) and the Cadence-acquired-Comdisco-Systems corporate narrative.
• Low confidence / unresolved: reel/frame numbers, correspondents of record, execution (vs. recording) dates, and whether Colin K. Mick's inventor interest was separately assigned. I did not fabricate any of these. The Mick-assignment gap and the correspondent gap are the two items to close at Assignment Center.

I'll research the actual front-page "References Cited" for US 5,440,719 and verify against USPTO sources.

Let me try to pull the actual cited-references tables from the patent record and family search report.

Prior-Art Analysis — USPTO Patent No. 5,440,719 (Hanes & Mick)

Headline finding, stated up front: I could not retrieve the U.S. front-page "References Cited" table for US 5,440,719. The authoritative Google Patents record supplied to me contains no U.S. "References Cited" list and no "Citations" list — the only prior-art content in it is the auto-generated keyword string ("network, client, server, traffic, response"), which is a classifier, not a citation. My searches for the U.S. front-page reference list (Google Patents citations pane, FPO, Justia, EveryPatent, patentimages front-page PDFs) returned forward citations and other patents' reference lists, never 5,440,719's own. I will not invent the list. Below I give you (a) what is verifiable, (b) the only reference set I can legitimately tie to this patent's examination record, and (c) a transparent §102 mapping.

1. USPTO record confirmation — patent 5440719 (look-alikes excluded)

Explicitly excluded as NOT this patent (the search hit these and I filtered them out): JP 特許第5440719号 B2 (Toyota reactor/core patent, published 2014-03-12); Florida registration/FEI number 47-5440719; the Beyond Meat share-count figure. None are US 5,440,719 and none are relevant.

One process flag: the task states the current date as 2026-04-26, whereas the session is running 2026-09-29. This does not change the art analysis, but it would shift the §286 six-year damages lookback window if you are using the date for a live matter.

2. Why I cannot give you "each patent citation for 5440719"

A §102 anticipation walkdown requires the examiner's cited references, which live in exactly one place: the patent's front page (56) References Cited and the file wrapper. Neither was available to me in this session. Specifically:

• The supplied Google Patents text of US5440719 stops after the detailed description; there is no (56) References Cited block and no Citations/Cited-By table.
• Repeated targeted searches returned other patents' (56) blocks (e.g., US 9,937,130; US 11,143,228; US 11,436,095; US 11,485,320) that merely cite 5,440,719 — those are the citing patents, not the cited art.
• I therefore cannot tell you which U.S. patents the examiner of record actually relied on. Stating that as an absence of evidence, not a finding.

The only legitimate substitute I have is the search report for the EPO family member, EP 0 595 440 (the EP counterpart of this exact U.S. patent — the EP 0 895 375 family annex lists US 5,440,719 A / 1995-08-08 as the U.S. member of EP 0 595 440). That search report is the reference set I map below, flagged as an acknowledged proxy — U.S. and EPO examiners search differently, and the U.S. list should be pulled from PatentCenter before this is relied on.

3. Reference-by-reference mapping (proxy set — EP 0 595 440 examination record)

Claim-numbering anchor: the search report cites references against claims 1, 2 and 6, which tells us the EP claim set numbered at least six, with claim 1 independent. I do not have the literal claim text (flagged in the earlier Patent-summary section), so all §102 mapping below is against the inferred independent-claim scope and the cited claim numbers.

4. Documents I retrieved and excluded as non-responsive (so you can see the filter)

Family members / self-citations — not prior art to 5,440,719:

• EP 0 595 440 A2 (Comdisco Systems Inc), pub. 1994-05-04 — the EP counterpart; the family annex confirms US 5,440,719 A / 1995-08-08 as its U.S. member. Same invention; cannot anticipate itself.
• Also cited together with EP 0 595 440 in the EP 0 895 375 search report, and not citations of 5,440,719: US 5,481,549 A (Tokuyama Saburo, 1996-01-02) and US 5,615,135 A (Hershey Paul C et al., 1997-03-25) — both rated "A" in that application. Content unverified; they are late-published vs. the 1992 priority and are not 5,440,719 citations.

Forward citations (post-date the patent — cannot be prior art): US 5,632,014; EP 0 634 718 A2; EP 0 935 888 A2; US 5,809,282; US 20020178246 A1; JP 特開平 9-062601 (NEC, filed 1995-08-21). These cite 5,440,719; they are not cited by it.

Look-alike, excluded: JP 特許第5440719号 B2 (Toyota) — a Japanese patent whose number coincides with this U.S. grant number.

5. §102 conclusions

1. No retrieved reference anticipates. Every document in the proxy examination record is EPO category "A" — "documents defining the general state of the art which is not considered to be of particular relevance." There is no "X" citation in the record I can access, so no reference can be mapped to an anticipating §102 rejection of any claim (1, 2, or 6) on the strength of the record as it stands.
2. The real §102 exposure is a reference that was never of record: the VLSI-TSA 1991 paper (§102(b), published ~17 months before filing). If the issued claim 1 is drafted broadly around "generate a subsequent request only after the correlated prior response is received and a waiting time elapses, such that simulated network delay stretches request timing," that paper is an anticipation problem, not merely an obviousness problem.
3. Statutory-class corrections. All items dated more than one year before 1992-10-27 are §102(b) art, not §102(a). That includes Delis (1991-10-13), Protogeros (Oct 1990) and Reijns (Dec 1986). This corrects the earlier section's categorisation of Delis — see the ⚠ flag in the table.
4. Most likely to survive any challenge are limitations I could not verify in any retrieved reference: deriving the parameters from an analyzer trace taken with no other client accessing the server, and subtracting protocol overhead (e.g., 34 bytes) before scripting. A claim expressly requiring those steps is materially stronger than one reciting only the request/response feedback behaviour.
5. Caveat that caps everything above: the U.S. examiner's actual cited art was not available, my reference set is the EPO family search report used as a proxy, and the literal U.S. claim text was not obtained. This is a §102/§103 orientation, not a validity opinion.

6. Verification steps to close the two gaps

1. Pull the U.S. (56) References Cited and the full claim set from USPTO PatentCenter (Application 07/967,636 / Patent 5,440,719) and from the Google Patents "Claims" + "Citations" tabs — this is the single highest-value action and it directly closes gap #1.
2. Obtain the full texts of EP-A-0 046 466, Delis 1991, Protogeros 1990 and Reijns 1986 to convert the "A"-rated summaries above into verified disclosure mappings.
3. Confirm the publication date and public accessibility of the VLSI-TSA 1991 paper for §102(b) purposes — this is the one reference with genuine anticipatory potential.

I'll attempt to close the critical gap the Prior Art section flagged — the literal claim text — before building the § 103 analysis on the reconstructed claim.

I retrieved something the prior sections could not: the literal Claim 1. Let me try to pull the dependent claims before building the analysis.

I have the literal Claim 1 now. One more targeted attempt to capture the dependent claims.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,440,719 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Two threshold corrections before the analysis

0.1 — I retrieved the literal Claim 1, which the earlier sections could not, and it materially contradicts the prior reconstruction.

The "Patent summary" section stated, with an explicit low-confidence caveat, that the independent claim "would typically recite" the four-parameter Client/Server Paradigm (Client Waiting Time, Client Request Size, Server Response Time, Server Response Size), overhead subtraction, and script conversion. The literal Claim 1 does not recite any of those things. The claim text I recovered (from the RPX Insight record of the patent) is:

1. A method of simulating data traffic being transmitted over a network among a plurality of nodes interconnected by the network, the data traffic comprising a plurality of conversations among the plurality of nodes, one or more of the plurality of nodes being a client node and one or more of the plurality of nodes being a server node, said method comprising the steps of:

• providing a model representative of the network;
• characterizing one or more of the plurality of conversations as a series of one or more request/response interactions, each of the one or more interactions comprising transmission of a request message from one of the one or more client nodes to one of the one or more server nodes, and wherein none, some or all of the one or more interactions further comprise transmission of a response message associated with the request message, the associated response message transmitted from the one server node back to the one client node in response to receiving the request message; and
• generating data representative of the one or more interactions of each of the characterized conversations, said step of generating further comprising the steps of;
• inputting the generated data for each of the interactions into the network model to determine when the associated response message of each of the interactions having one are received by the one client; and
• when the request message of one of the interactions is dependent on the one client node's receipt of the response message associated with a previously generated request message, delaying the inputting of the data representative of the dependent interaction into the network model until the response message associated with the previously generated request message is received by the one client node as determined by the network model.

This changes the § 103 answer substantially. Claim 1 is a narrow, single-limitation claim. The four-parameter paradigm, the isolated-baseline trace requirement, the 34-byte overhead subtraction, the sub-message recombination, the ATG script format, and the "thinking time" conversion are not in Claim 1. They can only be reached via dependent claims (text not yet recovered) or the specification.

0.2 — Remaining gap, stated plainly. I still could not retrieve the dependent claims, the total claim count, any other independent claim, or the literal (56) reference list. A fragment in the RPX record ("providing a model representative of the network;") suggests the claim set has a parallel structure I have not fully seen. I am not assigning limitations to numbered dependent claims I have not read. Everything below is anchored to the literal Claim 1 and to the prior art verified in the earlier "Prior Art" section — ISO 7498-1984; the BONeS® Designer manuals; the Network General "Sniffer" manuals; the Comdisco PlanNer ATG (Appendix A); and the five categories of art the specification itself admits.

0.3 — Governing law. Effective filing date is 1992-10-27, so pre-AIA § 103 applies. Because the prosecution is pre-KSR, examiners applied the TSM test; but for any present-day validity challenge (litigation or reexamination), KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007), governs the § 103 inquiry, including its "expansive and flexible approach," the "predictable variations" doctrine, and the instruction that an explicit teaching, suggestion, or motivation is not a rigid requirement. I analyze under KSR and note where the TSM-era record differs.

1. Elementization of Claim 1

Claim construction notes relevant to § 103:

• "as determined by the network model" (in 1.3b) is the operative phrase. It requires that the gate be resolved by the simulation model's own computation of response receipt — not by a fixed timer, not by a recorded trace timestamp, and not by a wall-clock measurement. This is what makes the traffic source load-responsive.
• "none, some or all" in 1.2 means a response is optional per interaction; 1.3b requires at least one request to be response-dependent.
• There is no express numerical or parameter-based limitation (no four parameters, no overhead, no script). Per Phillips v. AWH (pre-AIA) these are not read in from the specification; per the summary section, importing them would be error.

2. Graham factors

2.1 Level of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA), as of October 1992

A person with a B.S. (or M.S.) in computer science or electrical engineering plus ~2–5 years' experience in network performance analysis and discrete-event simulation, familiar with:

• Discrete-event simulation mechanics (event queues, event scheduling, time-stamped events, blocking/waiting constructs);
• Queueing/resource-allocation modeling (servers, trunks, buffers — the BONeS library blocks);
• LAN/WAN protocols and the OSI layering (ISO 7498-1984);
• The commercially available tools of the day — BONeS® Designer and its PlanNer ATG, and network analyzers such as the Network General Sniffer.

This is a narrow, sophisticated but small art. That cuts against obviousness in one sense (few artisans, high sophistication) but for it in another (the artisans were the very people who wrote the BONeS/ATG manuals incorporated into the patent).

2.2 Scope and content of the prior art (from the Prior Art section)

2.3 Differences between the prior art and Claim 1

Only one limitation separates Claim 1 from the admitted/verified art, and it is 1.3b. Everything through 1.3a is squarely disclosed by the BONeS/ATG combination: BONeS gives the network model (1.0–1.1); the ATG gives script-driven, application-representative request/response message generation (1.2–1.3a); and BONeS's Destination Node timestamping gives model-computed receipt times (1.3a). What the patent asserts as its contribution is that the traffic source will not emit the next correlated request until the model says the response arrived — a closed loop between model and event generator.

So the entire § 103 question collapses to: would a PHOSITA in October 1992, reading the ATG/BONeS materials (or the admitted art), have found it obvious to gate a dependent request on the model's computed receipt of the prior response?

2.4 Secondary considerations (objective indicia)

Essentially unavailable and, where available, weak or mixed:

• No litigation, no PTAB record (per the prior sections) → no judicial findings of validity, no nexus evidence, no licensing/industry-praise record.
• No evidence of commercial success attributable to the claimed feature, and the practicing products (BONeS/ATG) predate and were the source of the prior art — a nexus problem for the patentee.
• Long-felt need / failure of others: the specification itself marshals this (it criticizes statistical models as "gross approximations" and trace replay as invalid once the configuration changes). Under KSR this is a legitimate consideration but is not dispositive, and it is substantially undercut by the fact that the same commercially available tool family already offered script-based, thinking-time-aware, remote-delay-aware traffic generation (the ATG manual).
• Teaching away: the specification does not teach away from any cited art; it criticizes open-loop models but does not disparage the closed-loop idea as unworkable (it invented it).

3. The combinations, with motivation

Ground 1 (primary): BONeS® Designer + PlanNer ATG, as a single integrated system

What it teaches. BONeS supplies 1.0, 1.1, 1.3a. The ATG supplies the scripted, application-representative request/response traffic of 1.2 and reaches 1.3b through its own text: "When network requests are fulfilled, the user may, after some thinking, present a new request," combined with its express modeling of "delay attributed to remote resources" and reporting of "Total Transaction Delay." A system that models a request, models the remote resource's delay, and then has the user present the next request only after the request "is fulfilled," is the Claim-1 architecture in ordinary words.

Why a PHOSITA would combine them. Motivation is not merely permissible — it is compelled:

1. They are a single designed system. The ATG is a BONeS Designer module ("This module represents a host computer on a network segment"). Combining them is not hindsight; it is use for their intended purpose. KSR: "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results."
2. The reference's own stated purpose supplies the motivation. The ATG guide's stated purpose is to realistically reflect "typical demands presented by individual (or multiple) application programs," including human thinking delay and remote-resource delay. A POSITA implementing that stated purpose in a discrete-event simulator schedules the next request relative to the fulfillment event — because that is how discrete-event simulation represents causal dependency (event scheduling conditional on another event).
3. Predictable result. Gating an emission on the modeled arrival of a prior event is a routine, predictable use of the DES event-scheduling mechanism; there is no unpredictable or unexpected result.

The claim-chart core. The only genuinely disputable element is 1.3b's requirement that receipt be "as determined by the network model." Ground 1 meets it if the "thinking" delay is scheduled from the model's computed fulfillment/receipt event rather than from a pre-set script timeline. The ATG manual's "after some thinking, present a new request" following fulfillment, read in the BONeS closed-loop environment, supports exactly that. This is the strongest single § 103 theory on this record.

Ground 2: BONeS + ATG + Sniffer (trace-parameterized closed loop)

Combination: use Sniffer-captured traces to populate the ATG script (sizes and interarrival/thinking times), then run the closed loop as in Ground 1.

Added value: this reaches the dependent claims (the isolated-baseline trace, the four parameters, overhead subtraction) if Claim 1's dependents recite them — but those can only be assessed once I have the dependent claim text. For Claim 1 itself, Ground 2 is redundant over Ground 1: Claim 1 says nothing about where the data comes from. Motivation to combine the Sniffer is trivial (it is how you get real parameters), but its probative weight against Claim 1 is low.

Ground 3: BONeS/ATG + the admitted art (open-loop statistical models) + general DES knowledge

Combination: take the admitted statistical/queueing traffic models (or trace replay), combine with the BONeS network model, and modify the source to be response-gated.

Motivation (KSR "predictable variation" / "design incentive"): the specification itself identifies the problem — open-loop models are "gross approximations" and fixed to the sampled configuration. KSR holds that "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious." Replacing a fixed interarrival timer with a dependency on the modeled response event is precisely such a predictable reconfiguration, motivated by the recognized accuracy deficiency.

Weakness: the problem the patent identifies is the patentee's own framing; using the specification's criticism of the art to supply the motivation risks impermissible hindsight. This ground is stronger as a § 103 rationale and weaker as evidence.

Ground 4: ISO 7498-1984 + BONeS/ATG

Thin. ISO 7498 supplies only layering/application-origin context (part of 1.2's framing). It adds nothing to 1.3b. Not a standalone ground; include only as background.

Ground 5 (grounded in general knowledge, not a fabricated reference): the DES "conditional/blocking event" mechanism

A POSITA's general knowledge of discrete-event simulation includes blocking/waiting constructs and conditional event scheduling — the standard mechanism by which one modeled event is made contingent on another. If the fact finder credits that general knowledge (it is well within the PHOSITA definition above), then 1.3b is met by routine DES technique applied to the ATG's own request/response script, and Ground 1 becomes a "single-reference-plus-general-knowledge" case.

I deliberately do not name specific textbooks or references here, because the verified (56) list was not retrievable and I will not invent citations. This is the single highest-value gap to close: the actual (56) list and the EPO search report on family member EP 0 595 440 B1 are likely to contain simulation-methodology references that make Ground 5 a documentary ground rather than a general-knowledge ground.

4. Where the claim might survive (the patentee's best rebuttals)

1. "As determined by the network model" is the whole ballgame. If the patentee shows that the ATG/BONeS prior art generated script steps on a fixed pre-computed timeline (open loop) and that the "thinking time" was a constant independent of the model's evolving state, then 1.3b is not disclosed and the motivation to close the loop is the invention, not a design choice. The specification's own admissions (that prior trace replay and statistical models were configuration-fixed) support this rebuttal.
2. Self-publication / inventive-entity attack on Ground 1's best references. The BONeS manuals, the ATG Appendix A, and the Sniffer manuals are the applicant's own (Comdisco's) materials, incorporated by reference into the same application. To the extent their disclosure is attributable to the same inventive entity (Hanes/Mick, Comdisco employees), a challenger must confront a pre-AIA § 103(c) / "by another" issue and, for any § 102(a)/(b) self-publication dated within one year of the 1992-10-27 filing, a grace-period question. This is a real and potentially dispositive vulnerability in Ground 1, and it uses the patentee's own incorporation-by-reference against the challenger. Ground 3 (admitted art + KSR) is not exposed to this vulnerability and is therefore the more robust fallback.
3. The § 103(c) problem also propagates to the dependent claims, if (as I suspect but cannot confirm) they recite the four-parameter paradigm — because the ATG manual itself describes message size, message frequency, human interaction delay, and remote-resource delay. That makes the dependent claims more exposed to Ground 1, not less, but only if the self-publication hurdle is cleared.
4. No secondary considerations on either side — which means the case is decided on the prior-art record and claim construction, not on objective indicia.

5. Bottom line

One caution to carry forward: the prior "Patent summary" section's reconstruction of the independent claim (four parameters, overhead subtraction, script conversion) is contradicted by the literal Claim 1 and should be treated as superseded on that point. I have flagged rather than silently reconciled it, per the instruction to surface contradictions.

Sources: RPX Insight — US5440719A claim text; Google Patents US5440719A; US5440719 PDF, Appendix A (PlanNer ATG guide); USPTO.report grant/5440719.