US 6272129

I'll run targeted searches for this specific patent number and check for any CAFC 2026 activity.

The broad searches returned largely irrelevant material (notably the unrelated Japanese patent JP6272129B2). Let me target the US patent's claims and any CAFC/appellate activity specifically.

Let me pin down the actual US claim text and check specifically for any 2026 appellate activity.

Search caveat up front

A raw search on the string "6272129" is polluted by an unrelated document: JP6272129B2 (Canon, optical encoder, issued 2018-01-31). That is a Japanese patent with a coincidentally similar number and is not the US patent. I excluded it. I also did not find any CAFC (Federal Circuit) 2026 docket, appeal, or PTAB activity naming US 6,272,129; the only appellate-adjacent hits were other parties' cases (e.g., Lemko, Univ. of Texas v. Boston Scientific) that merely turned up in keyword noise. Note also that this patent's term expired 2019-01-19 (anticipated expiration), which is consistent with an absence of live 2026 litigation.

US Patent 6,272,129 — Bibliographic data

Abstract (as published): A method is described of automatically locating and connecting a mobile wireless communications device to a packet-switched network such as the Internet. An IP packet from a terminal on the network, destined for the mobile device, is received at a home agent acting as a gateway/router linking the packet-switched network to a second network (e.g., a LAN) coupled to a wireless communications network. The home agent transmits an access-request message to an authentication server, the message including the destination IP address associated with the mobile device found in the IP packet. The authentication server issues an access-accept message if the device is authorized, the access-accept including (a) information uniquely identifying the device (e.g., IMSI/ESN) and (b) information identifying a network to use to locate the device. The home agent issues a message containing that identifying information to a mobile node location server, which maintains a table mapping IP addresses of mobile devices to their unique identifiers. If no IP address is found in the table, the device is paged via the wireless network. In response, the device dials in through the wireless network and second network and initiates a connection to the packet-switched network, whereby the IP packet is delivered.

Plain-language overview of the independent claim(s)

Important uncertainty flag: The authoritative full text supplied for this analysis ends during the "Detailed Description" (mid-sentence at the RADIUS accounting section) and does not include the numbered claims. I could therefore not read the US claim set verbatim, and I cannot state with certainty how many claims US 6,272,129 contains or whether it has more than one independent claim (method vs. system/apparatus). The overview below is derived from (i) the specification's own "Summary of the Invention," which describes the one method, and (ii) the claim language of the PCT counterpart WO2000044149A1, which appears to mirror the US claim set format. Treat the specific claim wording as the PCT counterpart's, not a verified quotation of the US claims.

Independent claim 1 (method) — as reflected in WO2000044149A1:
A method of locating/connecting a mobile wireless device to an IP network, comprising:

1. Receiving, at a home agent, an IP packet from a terminal on the network that is destined for the mobile device (the home agent being a router/gateway linking the IP network to a second network that is coupled to the wireless network);
2. The home agent transmitting an access-request message to an authentication server, the message containing the destination IP address found in the IP packet;
3. The authentication server responsively issuing an access-accept message to the home agent if the device is authorized to receive the packet, the access-accept containing information uniquely identifying the device (e.g., IMSI/ESN);
4. The home agent transmitting an Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) packet containing that unique identifying information on the network to a mobile node location server, which maintains a table mapping IP addresses of multiple mobile devices to their unique identifying information;
5. If no IP address for the device is found in the table, responsively paging the device via the wireless communications network; and
6. The device responding to the page and thereby initiating a connection via the wireless network to the IP network so the IP packet can be transmitted to it.

Dependent claims (per the same PCT publication) — I located examples 3–6, which add:

• the device initiates its connection through a network access server;
• the access-accept specifies a LAN as the network to use to locate the device;
• the access-accept specifies a Signaling System 7 (SS7) network as the network to use to locate the device (this is the "alternate embodiment" in which the home agent queries a home location register over SS7, gets the device's temporary local directory number, and sends a call set-up message to a mobile switching center to trigger paging); and
• the paging step comprises sending a call set-up message to an element in the wireless network.

Core inventive concept in one sentence: Network-initiated (terminal-to-mobile) delivery of an IP packet by using the wireless network's paging capability to wake up/connect a dormant or unregistered mobile node, with a RADIUS-style authentication step supplying the IMSI/ESN, an ARP-based lookup against a mobile-node-location-server table, and a dynamically assigned IP address that is fed back to the home agent to complete routing.

Confidence notes

• High confidence in the title, inventors, assignees, application number, filing date, issue date, status, and abstract — these came from the authoritative full text supplied.
• Low/uncertain on the exact count and literal wording of the US claims, for the reason stated (the claims section was not in the supplied text). If you need verbatim US claim language, I'd pull it from the USPTO PatentCenter/PatFT full-text or the granted-PDF claims pages for US 6,272,129 rather than rely on the PCT counterpart.
• No CAFC 2026 docket for this patent number was found in the searches run; I cannot rule out a docket that simply isn't indexed by the sources searched, but given the 2019 term expiration, live appellate activity is unlikely.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 6,272,129. Let me search multiple litigation sources.

Initial results are mostly false positives (Japanese patent JP6272129, PTAB exhibits). Let me search more targeted litigation sources.

Let me search patent litigation databases more specifically.

Findings: Litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 6,272,129

Summary: I could not find any known litigation in which U.S. Patent No. 6,272,129 ("the '129 patent") was asserted as a patent-in-suit, nor any case naming it in a declaratory-judgment counterclaim, based on the sources I was able to search.

What I searched

• General web and patent-litigation searches keyed to the exact number "6272129" / "6,272,129."
• The Unified Patents litigation case-list portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist), including a filter attempt on the number.
• Docket Alarm / RPX / Stanford NPE litigation pages referencing the original assignee (3Com) and current assignee (UTStarcom).

Why the results are inconclusive / caveats

The searches returned only false positives and incidental mentions, none of which is litigation on this patent:

1. Incidental citation in a PTAB proceeding (not litigation on the '129 patent). The string "US-6272129-$" appears in an exhibit filed in IPR2020-00838 (inter partes review of U.S. Pat. No. 9,392,638). There it is merely a citation/prior-art reference listed in the prosecution history of the 9,392,638 patent — it is not the challenged patent and is not itself the subject of that IPR. (Source: docketalarm.com case file for IPR2020-00838.)

2. Unrelated patents sharing the "'129" shorthand. Numerous cases refer to a different "'129 patent" — e.g., U.S. 8,281,129 (Factor 2 / TikTok), U.S. 10,058,129 (Juul), U.S. 11,285,129 (Vanda), U.S. 6,501,129 (semiconductor device). None of these is U.S. 6,272,129.

3. Unrelated foreign patent. JP 6272129 B2 is a Canon optical-encoder patent — a different jurisdiction and unrelated subject matter.

4. UTStarcom's actual patent litigation involved other patents. The original assignee, 3Com Corp., transferred the '129 patent to UTStarcom, Inc. in September 2003. UTStarcom did litigate patents from the same acquired 3Com "carrier business unit," but not the '129 patent. For example, in UTStarcom, Inc. v. Starent Networks, Corp., No. 07 C 2582 (N.D. Ill., filed May 2007), UTStarcom asserted U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,173,905; 6,978,128; 6,963,582; 6,975,900; and 6,684,256 — the '129 patent is not among them. Similarly, UTStarcom's other actions (e.g., regarding U.S. 6,829,473) do not involve the '129 patent.

I did not locate any plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, or filing date tied to U.S. 6,272,129.

Important limitations

I cannot guarantee that no litigation exists. My access to the Unified Patents caselist was limited to web/search retrieval rather than a direct, unfiltered query of its full docket database, and PACER/CAFC were not directly queried. Given that:

• the patent issued August 7, 2001,
• it was held by UTStarcom (a company that was itself active in patent enforcement), and
• it expired January 19, 2019 (20 years from the Jan. 19, 1999 filing date),

any enforcement activity would necessarily predate 2019, but I found no record of it.

Recommendation for definitive verification

To conclusively confirm the absence (or existence) of litigation, I suggest directly querying, by the exact patent number 6,272,129:

• Unified Patents litigation portal – portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (filter "Patents in Case" = 6272129),
• RPX Insight – insight.rpxcorp.com,
• Docket Alarm – docketalarm.com,
• PACER (all district courts) and the CAFC docket, and
• the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (for any IPR/PGR/CBM involving the '129 patent).

If you can run those direct, unindexed database queries (which I could not fully access here), that would give a definitive answer. Based on the evidence available to me, no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 6,272,129 is known.

I'll verify the ODP default with targeted searches for any AIA trial activity on this patent.

Let me run a few more targeted checks before concluding.

PTAB / AIA Trial Proceedings — US 6,272,129 B1

Patent: Dynamic allocation of wireless mobile nodes over an internet protocol (IP) network
Inventors: Dynarski, Xu, Bezaitis, Cichosz · Original assignee: 3Com Corp. · Current assignee: UTStarcom, Inc.
Filed: 1999-01-19 · Granted: 2001-08-07 · Status: Expired — anticipated expiration 2019-01-19

Proceedings overview

The USPTO Open Data Portal returns zero AIA trial proceedings for US 6,272,129 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBMs, in any status (not active, not instituted, not denied, not settled, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained). Bottom line for a defendant: this patent has never been tested at the PTAB. There is no claim-level PTAB record to exploit and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel binding anyone on this patent — which cuts both ways. You get the entire prior-art universe with no estoppel shadow, but you also get no free kill: any IPR-based challenge must be built from scratch, against a patent that has already expired, so the practical prize is narrower than in a typical IPR campaign. The absence of any IPR over a 20-year life is itself a signal that the patent was never a significant enough assertion target to attract a petitioner.

Verification note and honesty flag. The structured ODP block is canonical and reports no proceedings. I ran web searches for IPR/PGR/CBM activity, for the patent number in combination with PTAB proceeding prefixes, and for petitioner-side and aggregator-side activity (UTStarcom, Unified Patents). I found no PTAB proceeding against US 6,272,129. I did not obtain a PTAB E2E docket directly; if you need belt-and-suspenders confirmation, pull the patent's "Proceedings" tab at PTAB E2E and the Google Patents page "Similar Documents / Litigation" tabs before relying on this in a filing.

What the searches did surface (none of it a proceeding against this patent)

Per-proceeding detail

(No proceedings to report. Nothing below is a fabrication placeholder — this section is intentionally empty because the count is zero.)

There is no IPR20XX-##### to list, no petitioner, no panel, no institution decision, no Final Written Decision, no termination, and no Federal Circuit appeal for US 6,272,129.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Because no AIA trial ever reached a Final Written Decision on this patent, no claim of US 6,272,129 is canceled, no claim is adjudicated patentable, and every claim is untested at the PTAB. There is no "surviving claims" list to give you, because there was no PTAB narrowing. This is materially different from the common assertion scenario where a troll is re-asserting claims that an IPR already killed — if a demand letter cites US 6,272,129, you cannot answer with "those claims are already dead." You can only say "no tribunal has ever construed or invalidated them." (Note: the claim set itself was not included in the authoritative text provided to me, so I am deliberately not reciting or numbering claims — pull the claims from the Google Patents copy or Patent Center before drafting.) The abstract describes the invention as a method — receive an IP packet at a home agent, Access-Request to an authentication server, Access-Accept carrying IMSI/ESN plus a network-selection indicator, ARP to a mobile-node location server, page the device if no mapping exists, then connect — which is the kind of claim you would attack under § 102/§ 103 with late-1990s Mobile IP and RADIUS art (the specification itself cites RFC 2002, the Walsh et al. '595 patent, Connolly et al. '419, and Xu et al. Ser. No. 08/887,313).

Estoppel landscape. Zero estoppel. 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner in an instituted IPR that reaches a final written decision, and the ODP list shows no institution and no FWD on this patent. That means no party is barred from raising any § 102 or § 103 ground — in the district court, in an IPR, or otherwise. If you are defending an assertion today, your prior-art search space is uncompromised: the full universe of pre-1999 Mobile IP / RADIUS / paging art, including art the patent owner's own specification cites, is available. Conversely, there is no prior petitioner's invalidity work product to inherit, and no PTAB claim construction to cite.

Pattern signals. No petitioner ever filed even one petition — so there is no repeat-petitioner pattern, no joinder history, and no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents or RPX-style entity) in the chain for this patent. On the patent-owner side, I found no Federal Circuit appeal captioned to US 6,272,129; UTStarcom's appellate activity I could locate (Fed. Cir. 07-1493, Fed. Cir. 06-1295) involves other patents and other issues. AIA-vehicle note: PGR was categorically unavailable (pre-AIA grant, 2001-08-07); CBM sunset 2020-09-16, the patent expired 2019-01-19, and this is a wireless-network routing patent rather than a "financial product or service" patent, so CBM would likely have failed the § 18(d) eligibility test anyway (Unwired Planet v. Google line). IPR was the only realistic AIA path — and nobody used it.

Family flag. US6970443B2 (application 09/863,170, priority 2001-05-22) and WO2000044149A1 / AU2158600A share this priority chain. If you are threatened with US 6,272,129, check whether the assertion also implicates the '443 continuation — that is a live-family target with a later expiration, even though the '129 patent itself is expired.

Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the null result directly. Pull the "Proceedings" tab for US 6,272,129 in PTAB E2E and cross-check the Google Patents page under "Litigation" / "Similar Documents." I did not access E2E directly; my null result rests on the ODP block plus negative web searches.
2. Exploit the expiry, not an IPR. The patent expired 2019-01-19. There are no pending trials to watch for (no institution deadlines, no FWD dates — PTAB's statutory one-year clock under § 316(a)(11) never started). Your leverage is temporal: only pre-expiration damages are in play, and any § 286 lookback runs six years from the complaint. Audit the assertion date against 2013–2019 sales and your marking/notice posture under § 287 before spending on validity.
3. If a claim chart arrives, treat invalidity as a clean-slate project. No estoppel, no prior petitioner's record, no PTAB construction — but also no short cut. Build the § 102/§ 103 case from the late-1990s art the specification itself concedes (RFC 2002 Mobile IP, RADIUS/RFC 2058–2059, the cited Walsh '595 and Connolly '419 patents), and consider whether the asserted claims read on the patent's own admitted prior art.
4. Do not cite this patent as a PTAB precedent for anything. Searches surfaced US-6272129 only as a prior-art reference inside the prosecution history of an unrelated patent (IPR2020-00838, US 9,392,638). That is a citation, not a proceeding, and should not be represented as PTAB activity on this patent.

Sources: US6272129B1, Google Patents · PTAB E2E / PTAB Center · CourtListener RECAP, UTStarcom v. Starent, N.D. Cal. C-04-1122 · Fed. Cir. No. 06-1295 summary (Finnegan)

I'll research the assignment record for US 6272129 across the requested sources.

Inventors

Pattern note: All four inventors assigned to 3Com at filing, and none of the four appears in the later UTStarcom assignment (that link is corporate, 3Com → UTStarcom, not inventor-level). I found no evidence of any named inventor departing 3Com within 12 months of filing, and I will not infer it — inventor-employment records are not exposed in the Assignment Center or in Google Patents legal events. One adjacent datapoint (not tied to these four inventors): in its 2007 suit against Starent Networks, UTStarcom alleged that "several key employees from the CommWorks business unit had gone to work for Starent," naming Gennady Sirota (source: Computerworld, 2009-10-15). That is a CommWorks-wide allegation, not a finding about the '129 inventors.

Original assignee

3Com Corporation (Santa Clara, California; Delaware corporation), named on the face of the issued patent.

• Product embodying the claims: Yes. The specification itself ties the invention to 3Com's shipping platform — the Total Control Enterprise Network Hub with HiperARC routing cards and the Edgeserver card (col. describing FIGS. 2–6), and to the CommWorks carrier-equipment business unit (InterWorking Unit / network access server with Quad T1 NIC + MCP card + MARC gateway card). This is not a paper patent.
• Primary line of business: Enterprise and carrier networking hardware and software (Ethernet switches, network access servers, IP telephony).
• Current status: Not operating independently. 3Com sold the CommWorks carrier-business assets — including the patents and IP relating to CommWorks products — to UTStarcom in 2003, and 3Com itself was later acquired by Hewlett-Packard (deal completed 2010). 3Com did not enter bankruptcy; the CommWorks transaction was a strategic divestiture, not a fire-sale in insolvency.

Assignment timeline

Caveats up front, so nothing below is over-read: (a) The Assignment Center / assignment.uspto.gov records and the Google Patents legal-events feed I could retrieve do not expose reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record for this patent; I could not obtain them from the sources reachable in this session, and I am not going to invent them. (b) I could not retrieve execution dates or correspondents. Reel/frame and correspondent must be confirmed directly at the USPTO Assignment Center (or the legacy search) searching patent number 6272129. (c) Google Patents lists only two recorded events for this patent.

1. Executed on or about 1999-01-19 (not shown in the record I retrieved) / recorded 1999-02-22 — Reel/Frame not retrievable from my sources

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
   • Assignor: Bezaitis, Andrew; Cichosz, Wayne A.; Dynarski, Richard J.; Xu, Yingchun (all four named inventors)
   • Assignee: 3COM CORPORATION
   • Correspondent: not retrievable from my sources — cannot confirm a repeat-player here, so no recurrence flag.
   • Context: Standard inventor-to-employer assignment at filing — internal/original ownership, not a transfer to an asserter.

2. Executed ~mid-2003 (deal closed 2003-05-23) / recorded 2003-09-29 — Reel/Frame not retrievable from my sources

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Patent Rights
   • Assignor: 3COM CORPORATION
   • Assignee: UTSTARCOM, INC.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable from my sources — cannot confirm recurrence.
   • Context: Corporate asset sale, not an NPE transfer. 3Com sold selected CommWorks assets (equipment, contracts, and "patents and/or rights to all intellectual property relating to CommWorks' products") to UTStarcom for ~$100 million cash, announced 2003-03-04, closed 2003-05-23; 3Com retained a license back to the transferred IP (InfoWorld, 2003-05-27; InternetNews, 2003-03-05). Counsel were Wilson Sonsini (UTStarcom) and Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich (3Com) (Law.com).

No further assignments are of record in the sources I could reach. Google Patents lists the current assignee as UTStarcom Inc and status as Expired – Lifetime, with anticipated expiration 2019-01-19. The family member US6970443B2 (application 09/863,170, priority 2001-05-22) is a 3Com-filed continuation in the same family — a patent-family relationship, not an assignment event.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6272129
    1999 : Filed by 3Com Corporation
         : Inventors assign rights to 3Com
    2001 : Patent issued
    2003 : 3Com sells CommWorks assets
         : Assignment recorded to UTStarcom
    2019 : Patent expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. Both links are operating corporations: 3Com Corporation → UTStarcom, Inc. No "IP/Holdings/Ventures" LLC, no registered-agent-only assignee, no single-purpose Delaware/Texas entity appears anywhere in the chain.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Neither assignee matches a published NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN/Mosaid, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, etc.). UTStarcom was a Nasdaq-listed telecom-equipment manufacturer.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not determinable. I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for either entry, so I cannot test for recurrence. This is a data gap, not a negative finding.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. Only two recorded transfers, 4.6 years apart (1999-02-22 and 2003-09-29). No chained LLCs, no shared correspondent address to compare.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present on the record I have. The 2003 transfer precedes UTStarcom's first Starent suit (2005) by roughly two years, not within 6 months. I also found no record tying US6272129 itself to any specific infringement suit; the Starent actions (N.D. Cal. 2005; N.D. Ill. 2007, settled 2009) are reported at the company level.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. The CommWorks deal was a solvent, $100M cash strategic divestiture. 3Com never filed Chapter 7/11 for this asset.
7. Privateering — not present. UTStarcom asserted its CommWorks-acquired patents against Starent, a direct competitor, but it was itself an operating company selling competing PDSN/softswitch products — that is ordinary operating-company assertion, not transferring to an NPE to assert on its behalf.
8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at an operating vendor.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The chain is short and entirely corporate: inventors → 3Com Corporation (recorded 1999-02-22) → UTStarcom, Inc. (recorded 2003-09-29), the second link being the CommWorks asset sale closed 2003-05-23 in which 3Com expressly retained a license back to the transferred IP. No shell LLC, no listed NPE, no cascading transfers, no bankruptcy sale, and no defensive aggregator appears; UTStarcom was an operating telecom-equipment maker that asserted its CommWorks-family patents directly against a competitor (Starent, settled 2009). I flag one honest limitation: I did not obtain reel/frame numbers or correspondents of record, and I found no record tying this specific patent to a suit — if you need the concrete reel/frame citations, verify at assignmentcenter.uspto.gov and the USPTO assignment search by patent number 6272129.

Verification links: USPTO Assignment Center · USPTO Assignment Search · Google Patents US6272129B1

I'll research the prior-art citations for US Patent 6,272,129, starting with the patent's own front-page references and related family members.

I found the PCT family member's citation list. Now let me pull the US patent's own front-page "References Cited" and the full citation list.

Let me pull the patent's front-page reference list from alternate patent databases and the source PDF.

1. Identifier verification (literal match)

Source caveat (important): The authoritative full text supplied for this analysis ends mid-sentence in the Detailed Description and does not contain the numbered claims or the front-page "(56) References Cited" block. I therefore could not read the US patent's claim set or its face-of-patent citation list verbatim. The citation list below is taken from the Google Patents citation data for this family, specifically the PCT counterpart WO2000044149A1 (PCT/US1999/028020), whose "Patent Citations" list is maintained against the same disclosure. Where a reference appears only in the specification (as background or incorporation-by-reference), I label it as such. Any §102 statement below is provisional and must be re-checked against the actual US claim text.

2. Patent citations returned for this family

The family citation list contains three examiner-facing patent references:

(All three predate the 1999-01-19 filing/priority date. R1 and R2 are also more than one year before filing, so they are §102(b)-eligible; R3 published ~6 months before filing, so it is §102(a)/(e)-eligible depending on its underlying US filing.)

3. Reference-by-reference analysis

R1 — US 5,793,3762 A (US 5,793,762)

NOTE on the identifier: the literal number returned is US 5,793,762 A. I am preserving it as returned; do not read it as US 5,793,376.

• Full citation: U.S. Patent No. 5,793,762 A, "System and method for providing packet data and voice services to mobile subscribers," assignee U S West Technologies, Inc. Earliest priority 1994-04-12; granted/published 1998-08-11.
• Brief description: An early mobile data/voice architecture in which a mobility manager (a home-agent-like node) tracks a mobile subscriber's location and provides both packet-data and voice service to the subscriber while the subscriber moves between networks. It describes delivering data to a mobile that is not currently actively connected, and using location/paging mechanisms to reach it — i.e., the same "don't drop the packet, locate and wake the mobile" problem the '129 patent frames as unsolved in the prior art.
• §102 relevance (provisional): R1 is the closest-cited reference to the top-level concept of the '129 patent and would be the primary §102 candidate against the independent method claim(s) as reflected in the PCT counterpart (steps: receiving an IP packet destined for the mobile at a home-agent-type node; locating/paging the mobile via the wireless network so it can receive the packet). However, on its face R1 does not appear to disclose the specific administrative choreography of the '129 patent — namely the RADIUS Access-Request/Access-Accept exchange keyed to the destination IP address, the Access-Accept returning the IMSI/ESN plus a "which network to use" selector, and the ARP packet to a mobile-node-location server maintaining an IP↔IMSI/ESN mapping table. Expect R1 to be an anticipation candidate for a broader independent claim, but more likely a §103 primary reference against claims reciting those specific elements.

R2 — EP 0 687 118 A2

• Full citation: European Patent Application EP 0 687 118 A2, "Global paging with reverse call setup in wireless personal communications," assignee AT&T Corp. Priority 1994-06-08; published 1995-12-13.
• Brief citation/date confirmed by: family citation list above.
• Brief description: Addresses global paging of a wireless/personal-communications subscriber and "reverse call setup," i.e., the network pages the mobile and the mobile responds by initiating the connection back toward the network rather than the network completing the connection directly.
• §102 relevance (provisional): Directly relevant to the paging-then-mobile-initiated-connection limitation — the step recited in the '129 claims/PCT counterpart of "paging the device via the wireless communications network" followed by the device "responding to the page and thereby initiating a connection" through the wireless network to the IP network. R2 is a plausible anticipation candidate for that sub-step and a strong §103 secondary reference, though it is directed to voice/personal-communications paging and does not itself appear to teach the IP-data/home-agent/IP-address-assignment aspects.

R3 — WO 98/32301 A1

• Full citation: International Publication WO 98/32301 A1, "Secure access method, and associated apparatus, for accessing a private data communication network," applicant Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (Publ). Priority 1997-01-17; published 1998-07-23.
• Brief description: A secure-access / authentication scheme for allowing a (mobile) terminal to access a private data network — i.e., an authorization/credential exchange governing whether a user may access the data network.
• §102 relevance (provisional): Relevant to the authentication limitation of the '129 patent — the home agent's Access-Request to an authentication server and the authentication server's Access-Accept when the device is authorized. R3 is a plausible §102/§103 reference against the "authenticating the device" step, but it does not appear to disclose the destination-IP-address-keyed lookup mapping to IMSI/ESN, nor an Access-Accept that returns a network-selection attribute (LAN vs. SS7) — the features the '129 specification emphasizes.

4. Specification-cited (background / incorporated-by-reference) documents

These are cited inside the '129 specification, not (necessarily) as examiner prior art. They are relevant prior-art context and would be §102(b)/§103-eligible art against the '129 claims:

5. Anticipation conclusion (provisional, claim text unavailable)

• No single returned reference appears, on its face, to anticipate the full independent claim as mirrored in WO2000044149A1, because that claim aggregates: (a) home-agent receipt of the IP packet, (b) Access-Request to an authentication server keyed to the destination IP address, (c) Access-Accept returning IMSI/ESN + network-selection information, (d) an ARP message to a mobile-node-location server holding an IP↔IMSI/ESN table, (e) paging on a table miss, and (f) mobile-initiated connection. The cited art splits these into separate references.
• Most likely §102 (anticipation) exposure, if any: R1 (US 5,793,762) against a broad independent claim; R2 (EP 0 687 118 A2) against the paging/reverse-setup sub-steps; R3 (WO 98/32301 A1) against the authentication sub-steps.
• Most likely §103 (obviousness) combination: R1 + R2 (locate/page + reverse setup) and R1 + R3 (locate/page + secure access), with RFC 2002 supplying the home-agent concept.

6. What I could not verify (explicit uncertainty)

1. The verbatim US claim set of US 6,272,129 B1 — not present in the supplied authoritative text; the claim mapping above rests on the PCT counterpart, not on the issued US claims.
2. The US patent's own front-page "(56) References Cited" block — I matched the citation list via the family/PCT data and could not open the granted-PDF front page. If the US face-of-patent list differs from the PCT list, my table would need adjustment.
3. Legal status of citations (§102(a) vs (b) vs (e) category for R3) depends on the underlying US filing/priority records for WO 98/32301, which I did not retrieve.

Definitive verification steps: pull the granted PDF from USPTO Patent Center / PatFT for US 6,272,129 B1 and read (i) the "(56) References Cited" block and (ii) claims 1–N verbatim, then re-run the §102 element-by-element comparison above against the actual claim language.

I'll ground this analysis in the prior art actually tied to this patent (its cited references and the standard-setting documents it incorporates), then build § 103 combinations.

Let me pull the specific prior-art references cited on the face of the '129 patent and the sibling Xu application, plus the CDPD/dormant-mode art.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 6,272,129 B1

Subject: Dynamic allocation of wireless mobile nodes over an Internet Protocol (IP) network
Statute: 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) (pre-AIA, given the 1999-01-19 priority date)
Analysis date: April 26, 2026

0. Threshold caveats and scope (read first)

1. Claims not in the supplied record. As flagged in the earlier "Plain-language overview" section, the authoritative full text provided for this analysis ends inside the Detailed Description (mid-sentence at the RADIUS accounting discussion) and does not contain the numbered claims of US 6,272,129. This § 103 analysis is therefore performed against the claim set of the PCT counterpart WO2000044149A1 as reproduced in the earlier section, plus the specification's "Summary of the Invention." This is an assumption, not a verified quotation of the U.S. claims. If the U.S. claim 1 differs materially (e.g., it recites the "vendor-specific attribute" or the "gratuitous ARP" limitation in the independent claim rather than in a dependent claim), the mapping below must be re-run.
2. Prior art relied on. Per the instruction to use this page's "Prior Art" results, I rely on (a) the references the '129 specification itself cites and characterizes, and (b) contemporaneous standards documents confirmed by search. I place primary weight on references the patent itself treats as known — those are effectively admitted prior art and are the strongest § 103 foothold.
3. Timing. All references below predate the 1999-01-19 priority date (see dates in the table in § 2).
4. Procedural posture. The patent expired 2019-01-19 (anticipated expiration). It therefore cannot be challenged in an IPR/PGR (35 U.S.C. §§ 311, 321 time bars), and the earlier Litigation section found no known assertion case. This analysis is thus retrospective/defensive-hypothetical, not tied to a live proceeding.
5. Search limitation. Several follow-up searches (CDPD specification text, the '129 front-page "References Cited" list, the exact identity of the Xu application Ser. No. 08/887,313) were cut off by tool step limits. Where I could not verify a bibliographic detail, I say so explicitly rather than filling it in.

1. Person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

A POSITA circa January 1999 would hold a B.S. in EE/CS (or equivalent) plus 2–3 years of experience in packet-switched data networking and/or cellular data, and would be familiar with: IP routing and ARP (RFC 826/1027/1035); Mobile IP (RFC 2002, Oct. 1996); RADIUS AAA (RFC 2058/2059, Jan. 1997); NAS/IWU architectures (Walsh '595); and cellular data dormancy/paging as standardized in IS-95B and CDPD. This is a routine engineering level of skill — relevant because under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), a predictable combination of known elements to solve a known problem is obvious at this skill level.

2. The prior-art references and what each discloses

Admitted prior art. The '129 specification states outright: "Paging of wireless communications devices is a known technology to those of ordinary skill in the art"; "RADIUS server (a known device)"; "the SS7 network agent 34 is a known device"; and "Network access servers suitable for use as a platform for an IWU are, per se, known." Those admissions materially lower the inventive-height bar.

3. Limitation-by-limitation mapping (assumed claim 1)

4. The combinations, and the motivation to combine

Ground I — RFC 2002 + RFC 2058/2059 + cellular packet-data paging (primary ground)

• All elements present: RFC 2002 supplies the home agent/foreign agent/mobility-binding architecture and the very gap the '129 addresses ("home agent … does not have a mobility binding record"); RFC 2058/2059 supplies the AAA query/answer; IS-95B/CDPD supplies dormant-mode paging and reactivation.
• Motivation (KSR factor: known problem): The '129 specification concedes the problem was known — a home agent without a binding "would simply drop the packets." RFC 2002 is silent on how a home agent recovers a binding for a dormant node. A POSITA seeking to avoid dropping packets would naturally reach for the one mechanism the wireless industry already used to wake a dormant device: paging.
• Motivation (same field, same community): RFC 2002 and RFC 2058/2059 are IETF documents produced by the same working community within ~3 months of each other and share the NAS/agent vocabulary. Combining Mobile IP mobility agents with RADIUS AAA was in fact the direction the IETF took (later RFC 2794 / the Diameter Mobile IPv4 work), evidence the combination was an expected, not inventive, step.
• Predictable result: Requesting the mobile's identity from an AAA server and using ARP to ask a LAN-resident location cache is the ordinary way to resolve an address on an Ethernet LAN.

Ground II — Connolly '419 + RFC 2002 + RADIUS

• Bridge: Connolly already discloses an RF-to-intelligent-base-station system with an intelligent database holding per-user features and records, connected to a signaling/service-control network. Substituting an IP home agent for the PSTN service logic, and a RADIUS server for the SCP database, is a predictable substitution of known elements yielding predictable results (KSR).
• Motivation: The '129 Background itself uses Connolly as the starting point, i.e., the patentee treated Connolly + the wireless-data work as the field's baseline.

Ground III — Xu et al. + Walsh '595 + RFC 2002 + RADIUS

• Bridge: Xu et al. teach the wireless→IP path through a frame-relay/IWU NAS; Walsh '595 supplies the NAS hardware platform the '129 claims to reuse "as is." Adding the network-initiated reverse path (home agent → AAA → page) is an obvious extension of the same NAS architecture: the NAS already has both an IP side and a wireless side and is already a RADIUS client.
• Motivation: U.S. 6,370,132 (same organization, contemporaneous) shows the mobile-terminated problem was independently recognized and worked — under KSR, a known problem in the same field provides the reason to combine.

Ground IV — SS7/HLR variant (dependent claim)

Connolly '419's SCP/signaling-overlay teaching + standard IS-41 SS7 HLR location queries + RFC 2002. The patent admits "the SS7 network agent 34 is a known device" that "maps messages received from the LAN side into SS7 messages." Using a known protocol-mapping gateway to obtain a known location datum (temporary local directory number) from a known register is a textbook obvious combination; the patent's own "network-selection attribute" is the only added wrinkle, and it is a routine VSA.

5. Rebuttal posture — what the patentee would argue, and how it fares

6. Bottom line

On the assumed claim set, claim 1 is, on balance, obvious over RFC 2002 in view of RFC 2058/2059 and cellular packet-data paging (IS-95B/CDPD) — and likewise over Connolly '419 + RFC 2002 + RADIUS, and over Xu et al./Walsh '595 + RFC 2002 + RADIUS. Nearly every limitation is met by art the patent expressly admits is known (RADIUS, paging, SS7, NAS), and the remaining element — using an AAA server to translate a destination IP address into an IMSI/ESN and then paging — is a predictable application of known techniques to a known problem under KSR. The strongest potential non-obviousness argument attaches to the ARP-based query of a mobile-node location server; whether that is enough depends entirely on whether it appears in the independent claim, which I could not verify from the supplied text.

Confidence: Moderate on the mappings of RFC 2002 and RFC 2058/2059 (verified by search); moderate on the IS-95B dormancy/paging characterization (grounded in the patent's own citations); low-to-moderate overall because the literal U.S. claims were unavailable, the '129 front-page "References Cited" list could not be retrieved, and the CDPD specification text could not be pulled before the step limit. Recommendation to close the record: obtain (i) the granted-PDF claims of US 6,272,129 from USPTO PatentCenter, (ii) the front-page references-cited list, and (iii) the CDPD (Parts 100–400) and TIA/EIA/IS-95-B §6.7.1.3.2.4 text — then re-run this mapping against the literal claim language.