US 7177945

I'll run targeted searches for this patent number, including CAFC 2026 docket activity.

Let me run more specific searches on the claims and any litigation history.

Let me attempt one more search specifically for the claim text and any 2026 Federal Circuit activity.

Search result for US 7,177,945 — lookup confirmation

I located the patent record, but no CAFC 2026 docket activity for this number. Below is what is confirmed and where I am uncertain.

Bibliographic data (confirmed)

Note on assignee: Google Patents lists the current assignee as Citrix Systems Inc. The reassignment record shows a chain of security interests rather than outright sales (the Bank of New York 2002; Citibank/Citicorp 2007; Wilmington Trust, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs in 2022; releases/reassignments to Cloud Software Group, Inc. f/k/a TIBCO Software Inc. in 2023). Treat "current assignee" as a recorded-interest indication, not a legal conclusion.

Abstract (verbatim)

"The present invention is directed to a network switch that determines when specific content is hot and directs flow to one or more cache servers. The architecture of the present invention includes a decryption processor for authenticating clients and decrypting and encrypting transaction requests before the transaction requests are routed by the switch."

Related applications named on the face of the patent

The specification cross-references two concurrently filed applications by the same inventors: "High Performance Server Farm With Tagging and Pipelining" and "Intelligent Demand Driven Recognition of URL Objects in Connection with Oriented Transactions." Public assignment listings associate numbers such as 7,225,350 and 7,062,570 with titles in that family, but I am not confident which number maps to which title, so I am flagging that mapping as unverified.

⚠️ Independent claims — I do not have authoritative claim text

The patent text supplied to me (Google Patents extraction) contains the abstract, field/background, summary, drawings description, and the full detailed description, but it does not include the claims section. I also could not retrieve the claim text through search before hitting my search limit. Accordingly, I will not state the claims verbatim or quote claim numbers, and you should verify against USPTO PatentCenter for the definitive claim set (including the exact number of independent claims).

What I can say is what the specification describes as the invention's claimed subject matter, in plain language. Treat the following as a specification-grounded characterization, not claim language:

• Core switch/routing concept: A network flow switch (the "intelligent flow switch" or IFS, part of a "content director") sits between the communications network and a server farm, assumes the farm's global IP addresses, and acts as a reverse proxy. It receives transaction requests, parses application-layer payload for "invariants" — URL, cookie name/value, source/destination socket information — and selects a server in the farm based on those invariants.
• Security/decryption concept (the "non-intrusive" and "secure commerce" aspects): A decryption processor (SSL processor) is interposed so that encrypted (HTTPS/SSL) requests are authenticated and decrypted before the switch parses them. This lets the switch see URL/cookie invariants that would otherwise be hidden in ciphertext, and lets it maintain session persistency (SSL session-ID and application-payload persistence) across the transition from plaintext to ciphertext — which the background criticizes conventional Web switches for mishandling. The claim family is likely to include a switch/method that performs decryption-then-parse, and/or a system including such a decryption device coupled between the network and the switch.
• "Hot content" / cache-routing concept: The switch maintains a hot URL table (with hit counters, timestamps, and "lease terms") and a digest store (hash/MD5 of URL and cookie values). When a tunable "hot URL threshold" is met, subsequent requests for that content are redirected to cache servers rather than to origin servers, with digest-based table lookup and collision handling via chained/circular lists. The claims likely recite building the table by snooping URLs, comparing an incoming invariant against the table, and routing to a cache server when hot.
• Tagging concept: In "tagging mode," the switch generates a compact server identifier tag and appends it to the server's cookie on an outbound response, so that later client requests carrying that cookie are routed directly back to the same server.

Because the specification describes multiple, alternative operational modes (tagging mode only, digesting mode only, or both simultaneously), it is likely that the independent claims divide along method-vs.-apparatus lines and along these functional groupings. I cannot confirm the exact count or boundaries.

CAFC / litigation status

• No Federal Circuit 2026 docket or opinion referencing US 7,177,945 was found. Searches for the number against 2026 Federal Circuit materials returned unrelated matters. Please treat "no 2026 CAFC activity located" as not found in my searches, not as a verified negative.
• Disambiguation — these are NOT US 7,177,945:
  • JP 7177945 B2 (Japanese Patent No. 7177945) — Hewlett Packard Development Company, "Accessing registers of fluid ejection devices," issued 2022-11-24. Different jurisdiction, different subject matter.
  • US 8,605,794 (VideoLabs) — the VideoLabs/Unified Patents CAFC 2026 matters and the CourtListener opinion referring to a "'794 patent" (media/image-and-sound data segments) concern a different patent.
  • "7177945" appears as an FDA FAERS case number (Mirena report, 16-Nov-2009) — not a patent.
• Citrix-linked litigation surfaced in my searches involves other Citrix patents, not this one: e.g., Citrix Systems, Inc. v. Avi Networks, Inc. (patents discussing dynamic response-time availability, such as the '055/'954 patents, and IPR2019-00844 on 8,631,120), and AttestWave LLC v. Citrix Systems, Inc., D. Del. 1:25-cv-00250 (asserting 7,895,643).
• Practical note: the record shows the patent expired (adjusted expiration 2022-12-15), so it cannot be asserted for ongoing infringement as of today; only past-damages claims within the limitation period would remain theoretically available.

Uncertainty summary

1. I do not have the authoritative claim text for US 7,177,945; the "independent claims" discussion above is inferred from the specification and must be verified against the official record.
2. Current ownership is reported by Google Patents as Citrix Systems Inc., but the assignment chain includes security interests and releases; this is not a legal conclusion.
3. CAFC 2026 activity is unconfirmed — my searches found none, but this should be re-verified directly against the CAFC docket and PACER/PatentCenter before being relied upon.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 7177945 across the requested sources.

The initial searches returned results for different patents ('794 as shorthand for US 7,955,794, US 8,224,794, etc.). Let me search more specifically for US 7,177,945.

Summary Finding

Based on my searches, I found no litigation specifically involving U.S. Patent No. 7,177,945 ("Non-intrusive multiplexed transaction persistency in secure commerce environments," Avaya Technology LLC / now Citrix Systems, Inc.).

I want to be explicit: this is a negative finding based on the searches I was able to run. I could not retrieve a definitive "no cases" certificate, so I cannot rule out a case existing in a database I couldn't fully query. But nothing in my results identified US 7,177,945 as an asserted patent in any district court action, CAFC appeal, ITC investigation, or PTAB proceeding.

Important Caveat — The "'794" Shorthand Trap

Many search hits referred to a "'794 patent," but these are different patents, not US 7,177,945. Per your instruction not to conflate similar numbers, here is what those hits actually concern:

None of these concern US 7,177,945, whose title is "Non-intrusive multiplexed transaction persistency in secure commerce environments."

What I Did Confirm About US 7,177,945 (non-litigation)

• Patent: US 7,177,945 B2; App. No. 09/921,832; filed Aug. 3, 2001; granted Feb. 13, 2007; priority Aug. 4, 2000 (Provisional 60/223,087).
• Inventors: Jack Hong, Albert Bonyao Chu, Vijay Jaswa.
• Original assignee: Avaya Technology LLC; current assignee/owner of record: Citrix Systems, Inc. (assigned Oct. 27, 2009, per Google Patents reassignment history).
• Status: Expired – Lifetime (adjusted expiration Dec. 15, 2022). An expired patent is less likely to appear in new enforcement actions.
• The Unified Patents portal entry I retrieved was for the pre-grant publication US-20020073232-A1 and showed only patent citations/prior art — no litigation section was returned.

Relevant Context Worth Flagging (not litigation of this patent)

The former Avaya patent portfolio has recently been monetized and litigated:

• Arlington Technologies, LLC (a Dominion Harbor entity) acquired a large former-Avaya VoIP portfolio (announced April 3, 2024) and sued Comcast (E.D. Tex., 2024; settled) and then Deutsche Telekom / Sprint / T-Mobile (E.D. Tex. 2:25-cv-00279, 2025).
• However, the patents asserted there were 7,193,986; 7,324,491; 7,408,925; 8,886,789; and 9,398,055 — not 7,177,945. So this Avaya-portfolio campaign did not include US 7,177,945 in the assertions I found.

Bottom Line

• Known litigation asserting US 7,177,945: none found.
• Plaintiff(s): N/A
• Defendant(s): N/A
• Jurisdiction: N/A
• Case number: N/A
• Filing date: N/A
• Outcome/status: N/A

If you need a higher-confidence negative, I'd recommend running the number directly through PACER's patent docket search, Docket Alarm / CourtListener RECAP, Unified Patents' litigation case list, and the USPTO PTAB (P-TACTS) — searching the literal string "7177945" and the pre-grant publication "20020073232." My tool access was rate-limited before I could exhaust those sources, and I'd rather tell you that than overstate the finding.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" finding against web sources before writing this up.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks against PTAB-specific sources.

PTAB Proceedings Report — U.S. Patent No. 7,177,945

Patent: Non-intrusive multiplexed transaction persistency in secure commerce environments
App. No.: 09/921,832 · Filed: 2001-08-03 · Issued: 2007-02-13 · Expired: 2022-12-15
Report date: 2026-09-27

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — no IPRs, no PGRs, and no CBMs have ever been instituted or even petitioned against US 7,177,945, so there is no active/invalidated/sustained/settled/denied breakdown to report, and the defensive posture this creates is the opposite of the usual "hardened patent" story: the patent's validity has never been tested at the Board, meaning there is no IPR estoppel wall and no FWD language for a patent owner to hide behind — but also no invalidated claim to point your adversary to. A defendant facing assertion today is working from a blank PTAB slate in both directions.

This finding comes from the structured USPTO Open Data Portal ("PTAB proceedings on file") block, which returns no AIA trial proceedings as of the most recent ingest, and is consistent with my independent web checks (see "Verification performed" below). I am stating this as "not found in the sources I could query," not as a certified negative — see the caveat at the end.

Per-proceeding detail

Not applicable — there are no proceedings to itemize.

I am deliberately not generating the requested ### {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} blocks, because doing so would require me to invent proceeding numbers, panels, grounds, and dispositions. You instructed me not to fabricate, and with zero proceedings on file there is no honest way to fill that template. Every field — type, filing date, status, panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal, defensive value — is N/A for every claim of this patent.

Verification performed

Searches run for this report, and what each returned:

Disambiguation (important, because this is a recurring trap): the string "7177945" is not unique. It is JP 7177945 B2 (HP fluid-ejection), an FDA adverse-event case number, and a trademark/registration number in at least two foreign registries. As noted in the earlier-generated sections, the widely-cited "'794 patent" CAFC and PTAB matters (Illumina v. Ariosa / US 7,955,794; Massively Broadband v. Samsung / US 8,224,794; the VideoLabs matters) concern different patents. Nothing in those proceedings touches claim language from US 7,177,945.

Cross-check against the earlier-generated sections: the litigation summary reached the same negative ("no litigation specifically involving U.S. Patent No. 7,177,945") and the patent summary similarly found no CAFC 2026 activity. No contradiction exists between those sections and this one — all three converge on the same absence. The one thing I would flag is that the earlier patent summary also could not obtain authoritative claim text; I am in the same position, and that gap matters here (see below).

Strategic summary

Claim status: every claim of 7,177,945 is UNTESTED at the Board. There is no canceled claim, no sustained claim, and no amended claim to map. Because there is no Final Written Decision, I cannot tell you "claim 1 is dead" or "claims 1–5 survived" — and any party who tells you otherwise is likely confusing this patent with a different "'794." Practically, this means the whole claim set retains whatever scope it issued with in 2007, and its enforceability turns on district-court invalidity and any ex parte reexamination challenges, not on an IPR record. (I also found no ex parte/inter partes reexamination certificate for this number in my searches, but I flag that as not independently verified — the earlier sections' assignee/timeline research did not surface one either.)

Estoppel landscape: essentially clean, in both directions. Because no petitioner has ever filed an IPR on this patent, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel has never attached against anyone. A defendant asserting invalidity today is not boxed out of any prior-art ground by someone else's earlier PTAB filing, and is not limited to the printed-publication art that § 311(b) allows in an IPR — system art, public use, and on-sale theories remain available in district court and are entirely untested. Conversely, the patent owner has never had the benefit of a Board decision upholding a claim, so there is no favorable FWD reasoning to borrow. If you do file an IPR, note the usual bars: § 315(b) (one year from service of a complaint asserting the patent), § 315(a)(1) (no prior declaratory-judgment action of invalidity by the petitioner), and § 315(e)(1) estoppel on your own future petitions once an FWD issues.

Pattern signals: none, and that is itself the signal. There is no serial petitioner, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, or similar) with a petition or even a "pending" tag on this patent, and no PTAB→CAFC appeal chain. Two structural reasons explain it: (1) the patent is a 2001-filed / 2007-issued patent that reached its 2022-12-15 adjusted expiration without visible assertion activity — the earlier litigation summary found no campaign asserting it, including in the Arlington Technologies (Dominion Harbor) former-Avaya campaigns, which asserted 7,193,986 / 7,324,491 / 7,408,925 / 8,886,789 / 9,398,055 instead; and (2) the economics of an IPR invert once a patent is expired and unasserted. Note also that PGR is unavailable (this patent issued in 2007, far outside the 9-month window) and CBM is unavailable (the transitional program sunset for petitions on 2020-09-16, and a decryption-processor-plus-load-balancing patent is in any event a strong "technological invention" candidate that would likely be excluded from CBM eligibility).

A live macro risk to plan around: if you are contemplating an IPR as an offensive move, the presumption that IPR is the cheap kill is now materially weaker. USPTO institution practice has tightened sharply — the reported institution rate has fallen from a historical 60–70% band to roughly 38% on a fiscal-year basis, with a reported ~14% rate for Q4 2025 under the bifurcated procedure adopted in October 2025, and petition filings down roughly 75% year-over-year (BSA letter to House Judiciary, 2026-09-02). The "settled expectations" doctrine the PTO has been applying is expressly aimed at older patents (Unified Patents amicus brief, Supreme Court No. 25-1230). A 2001-priority, 2022-expired patent is squarely in the demographic that discretionary denial is now most likely to catch. Treat an IPR here as uncertain, not as a formality.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant being asserted:

1. Do not rely on, or fear, any PTAB record. There isn't one. No claims are canceled, so there is no FWD to link to and no disposition to quote — this report cannot hand you a "claim 1 is dead" shortcut, and I will not manufacture one. Your validity case must be built fresh.
2. Confirm the negative at the source. Run the literal strings 7177945 and 20020073232 through USPTO PTAB E2E / P-TACTS, the USPTO Patent Center file-wrapper ("Post-Grant" and "Reexam" tabs), and CourtListener RECAP. My finding is a search-limited negative, and the OPEN DATA ingest that backs this report can lag recent filings.
3. Get the claim text — this is the gating item. The earlier patent summary correctly flagged that the authoritative claims are not in the source text supplied (the Google Patents extraction at patents.google.com/patent/US7177945B2/en carried abstract, spec, and drawings but not the claims section). Without claims, no one can evaluate invalidity or infringement — and, unlike a normal PTAB analysis, there is no FWD here to substitute for the claim language. Pull the issued claims from Patent Center first; everything else is downstream.
4. Calibrate the damages clock. The patent is expired as of 2022-12-15, so there is no forward-looking injunction exposure and no ongoing royalties. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, any suit filed today reaches back at most six years for past damages (roughly 2020-09-27 forward) — a shrinking tail. For most defendants the rational posture is a license-negotiation floor set by remaining past-damages exposure, not a bet-the-company validity fight, unless the demand is large enough to justify one.
5. If you do file an IPR, budget for discretionary-denial risk under the current institution regime, and identify a compelling merits case plus grounds that are not merely cumulative of any parallel district-court art, since the PTO's current practice favors denial where there is parallel litigation and where the patent is old. Also preserve, within the one-year § 315(b) clock, whatever non-printed-publication prior art you have — IPR cannot carry system art.

If you are the patent owner (or Citrix/Cloud Software Group as recorded interest holder):

• You have a clean-slate claim set, but that also means zero PTAB validation to cite. Any assertion carries full validity risk, and the estate chain (Bank of New York 2002; Citibank/Citicorp 2007; Wilmington Trust, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs 2022; releases/reassignments toward Cloud Software Group f/k/a TIBCO and Citrix in 2023, per the earlier section) should be re-verified before any assertion, since standing depends on current ownership rather than on recorded security interests.

Caveats on this report

• The "no proceedings" finding is a negative inference. The structured ODP block returned none, and four targeted searches found none, but I could not execute a literal-string query directly inside PTAB E2E / P-TACTS within my tool limits. Treat this as a high-confidence working negative, not a certificate of no-proceedings.
• Claim-number granularity is impossible here. With no FWD, there is no claim-by-claim verdict to report for any claim of this patent. Any statement about specific claim numbers would be fabrication.
• Do not conflate this patent with JP 7177945 B2, US 7,955,794, US 8,224,794, or the various "'794" patents. Once claim text is in hand, re-run any proceeding search using the claim language itself — that is the only reliable disambiguator for a five-character number this collision-prone.

I'll research the assignment record for US 7,177,945, focusing on reel/frame numbers, conveyance types, and correspondents of record.

Let me dig into the specific assignment records, correspondents, and the Avaya-to-Citrix transfer.

Let me pin down the Avaya→Citrix transfer, the inventors' employer, and any reel/frame records.

Provenance note before the sections. The USPTO Patent Assignment Center itself (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) would not render through my available tooling — my searches against it and its mirrors returned the Google Patents "Reassignment" legal-events feed and third-party mirrors, not the Assignment Center record cards. I therefore have the event-level record (dates, conveyance types, assignors, assignees) but not the full reel/frame numbers and not the correspondent fields for most entries. Where I do have a reel/frame it comes from the text of the record itself (e.g. a release that names the instrument it releases), and I say so. I have not invented any reel/frame number, executed date, or correspondent. Where a datum is missing I mark it not retrievable.

Inventors

Pattern notes (documentable from the face of the record):

• Inventorship changed between the provisional and the non-provisional. The specification's cross-reference paragraph (and the patent's own data) states the provisional, Ser. No. 60/223,087 (filed 2000-08-04), named "Chu, Jaswa, and Chaganty." The issued patent names Hong, Chu, and Jaswa. So Chaganty dropped out and Hong was added at the non-provisional stage. This is a real, citable discrepancy — not an NPE signal, but it matters for chain-of-title diligence because any assignment from Chaganty (or his estate) is unnecessary, and any inventor declaration gap is a validity hook.
• All three inventors were Bay Area (Santa Clara County) residents while the assignee of record was a New Jersey corporation. Avaya did have Bay Area operations via subsidiaries — the Avaya-wide 2007 security agreements name VPNET Technologies, Inc. (San Jose, CA) and Octel Communications LLC as co-grantors — so a Bay Area Avaya engineering site is plausible, but I found no evidence linking these three inventors to any specific Avaya subsidiary, and I will not assert one.
• No "inventors departing within 12 months" signal. There is nothing in the record showing the inventors leaving Avaya; the patent was assigned to Avaya (through the inventors' assignment recorded 2002-10-15), consistent with ordinary employee invention assignment rather than a founder-departure/fire-sale pattern.
• Recording lag worth noting: the application was filed 2001-08-03 and the inventors' assignment of interest was recorded 2002-10-15, roughly 14 months later. Routine, but it means title was not of record at issue-prosecution start.

Original assignee

• Entity named on the issued patent: Avaya Technology Corp. (Basking Ridge, NJ). Some databases render this awkwardly — the sibling patent US 7,228,350's OCR shows "Araya Technology Corp., Basking Ridge, NJ," which is an OCR corruption of Avaya Technology Corp. (211 Mount Airy Road, Basking Ridge, NJ 07920). Google Patents' "filed by Avaya Technology LLC" line for the 2001 filing is a retroactive normalization artifact — Avaya Technology Corp. did not convert to an LLC until 2008-12-29.
• Status/business: Avaya is an enterprise unified communications / contact center company, spun out of Lucent Technologies in 2000. Its status across this patent's life: operating (2001–2017) → Chapter 11 in January 2017 → emerged and reorganized → Chapter 11 again in February 2023 → reorganized as Avaya LLC (Avaya Holdings name change) and effectively sold its patent portfolio to Arlington Technologies, LLC (a Dominion Harbor entity) in 2024.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Unclear. The specification describes a "content director" — a Layer 2/3/4/7 web switch with SSL offload, hot-URL detection, cache routing and cookie tagging — but I found no confirmation that Avaya ever commercialized such a box. Notably, the closest-named prior art cited in the family is Nortel Networks, "Alteon Personal Content Director" (2001) — i.e., the product name in the art is Nortel's, not Avaya's. Treat "Avaya shipped an embodying product" as unverified. Avaya's core line of business was telephony/UC, not application delivery controllers, which is a plausible reason the family was monetized out early.
• Whether the current holder ships an embodying product: Yes, plausibly strongly. Citrix NetScaler is an SSL-offloading load balancer with session persistence — the exact subject matter of this patent — so the chain ends at an operating company whose flagship product reads on the disclosure.

Assignment timeline

Dates below are the event dates in the recorded-legal-events feed. I could not separate "executed" from "recorded" date for each entry, and reel/frame is not retrievable for most entries — marked n/r.

1. 2001-08-03 — Reel n/r

   • Conveyance: Application filed / initial title (assignee of record Avaya Technology Corp.)
   • Assignor: inventors (Hong, Chu, Jaswa) by operation of employee invention agreement → Assignee: Avaya Technology Corp.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable
   • Context: Original corporate filing.

2. 2002-04-09 — Reel 012759/0141 (reel/frame inferred: the 2017-12-15 bankruptcy order expressly releases "THE BANK OF NEW YORK" security interest "RECORDED AT REEL/FRAME 012759/0141," and this 2002-04-09 event is the only Bank of New York security agreement in the chain — so the mapping is well supported but is an inference)

   • Conveyance: Security Agreement
   • Assignor: Avaya Technology Corp. → Assignee: The Bank of New York (as collateral agent)
   • Correspondent: not retrievable
   • Context: Securitization / blanket corporate lien over the Avaya patent estate.

3. 2002-10-15 — Reel n/r

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
   • Assignor: Jaswa, Vijay; Hong, Jack; Chu, Albert Bonyao → Assignee: Avaya Technology Corp.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable
   • Context: Confirmatory inventor-to-corporate assignment.

4. 2007-11-27 — Reel n/r (note: a different Avaya record, cited in this feed's text as 020156/0149, is the 2007 Citibank administrative-agent security agreement, but that number comes from other Avaya patents' records, not confirmed on this patent)

   • Conveyance: Security Agreement
   • Assignor: Avaya Technology LLC; Avaya, Inc.; Octel Communications LLC; VPNET Technologies, Inc. → Assignee: Citibank, N.A., as Administrative Agent
   • Correspondent: not retrievable
   • Context: Securitization (the 2007 Avaya LBO financing).

5. 2007-11-28 — Reel n/r

   • Conveyance: Security Agreement
   • Assignor: same Avaya group → Assignee: Citicorp USA, Inc., as Administrative Agent
   • Correspondent: not retrievable
   • Context: Securitization (first-lien financing alongside item 4).

6. 2008-06-27 — Reel n/r

   • Conveyance: Reassignment
   • Assignor: Avaya Technology LLC → Assignee: Avaya Inc.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable
   • Context: Internal corporate reorganization — upstreaming title into the parent.

7. 2008-12-29 — Reel n/r

   • Conveyance: Conversion from Corp to LLC
   • Assignor: Avaya Technology Corp. → Assignee: Avaya Technology LLC
   • Correspondent: not retrievable
   • Context: Change of legal form only, no change in beneficial ownership.

8. 2009-10-26 (×3) and 2009-10-26 — Reel n/r each

   • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party (four releases: Citicorp USA; Citibank, N.A.; Silicon Valley Bank; The Bank of New York)
   • Assignor: each secured party → Assignee: Avaya Inc. / Avaya Technology Corp., Avaya Inc.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable
   • Context: Lien discharges on refinancing — no transfer of beneficial ownership.

9. 2009-10-27 — Reel n/r ⚠️ the ownership-changing event

   • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
   • Assignor: Avaya Inc. → Assignee: Citrix Systems, Inc.
   • Correspondent: not retrievable on the assignment card; attorney of record for the patent as currently listed is FOLEY & LARDNER LLP / CITRIX SYSTEMS INC.
   • Context: Outright sale to an operating company. Citrix is a large patent filer and long-time Foley & Lardner client; this is not a shell/asserter transfer.

10. 2017-12-15 — Reel n/r (release; names reel/frame 012759/0141 as the instrument released)

    • Conveyance: Bankruptcy Court Order releasing liens
    • Assignor: The Bank of New York → Assignee: Avaya Inc. (f/k/a Avaya Technology Corp.)
    • Context: Avaya Chapter 11 (filed Jan 2017). Critically, this order run does not touch Citrix — Avaya's bankruptcy estate did not include this patent, confirming item 9 was an outright divestiture, not a security interest.

11. 2018-01-09 — Reel n/r

    • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
    • Assignor: Citicorp USA, Inc. → Assignee: Avaya Technology, LLC; Sierra Holdings Corp.; Avaya, Inc.; Octel Communications LLC; VPNET Technologies, Inc.
    • Context: Post-Chapter-11 clean-up of the 2007 Citicorp lien.

12. 2022-09-30 — Reel n/r

    • Conveyance: Security Interest
    • Assignor: Citrix Systems, Inc. → Assignee: Wilmington Trust, National Association
    • Context: Securitization tied to the Citrix take-private (Vista Equity Partners / Evergreen Coast Capital), which closed 2022-09-30.

13. 2022-10-07 (×3, same day) — Reel n/r for two; 062113/0001 is cited in item 16 as the instrument released

    • Conveyance: Patent Security Agreement (Bank of America, N.A., as Collateral Agent); Second Lien Patent Security Agreement (Goldman Sachs Bank USA) — this is the one at 062113/0001; Patent Security Agreement (Wilmington Trust, N.A., as Notes Collateral Agent)
    • Assignor: Citrix Systems, Inc. and TIBCO Software Inc. → Assignees as above
    • Context: Securitization of the combined Citrix/TIBCO platform (Cloud Software Group financing).

14. 2023-04-14 — Reel n/r

    • Conveyance: Release and Reassignment of Security Interest in Patent (releasing Reel/Frame 062113/0001)
    • Assignor: Goldman Sachs Bank USA → Assignee: Cloud Software Group, Inc. (f/k/a TIBCO Software Inc.), Citrix Systems, Inc.
    • Context: Refinancing release.

15. 2023-04-14 — Reel n/r

    • Conveyance: Patent Security Agreement
    • Assignor: Citrix Systems, Inc.; Cloud Software Group, Inc. (f/k/a TIBCO Software Inc.) → Assignee: Wilmington Trust, N.A., as Notes Collateral Agent
    • Context: Replacement securitization.

Note on the Avaya portfolio sale: the widely reported 2024 assignment of the former Avaya patent estate to Arlington Technologies, LLC (a Dominion Harbor entity) appears at reel 067022/0780 on other Avaya patents (e.g. US 7,173,986 / 7,324,491 / 7,408,925 family) — it does not appear on US 7,177,945's chain, because Avaya had already divested this patent to Citrix in 2009. That is an independent confirmation of the 2009 transfer.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7177945
    2000 : Provisional filed naming Chu Jaswa and Chaganty
    2001 : Nonprovisional filed by Avaya Technology Corp
         : Inventorship changed to Hong Chu and Jaswa
    2002 : Inventors assign interest to Avaya
         : Bank of New York security agreement
    2007 : Patent issued
         : Citibank and Citicorp security agreements
    2008 : Title upstreamed to Avaya Inc
         : Avaya Technology Corp becomes LLC
    2009 : All liens released to Avaya Inc
         : Assigned to Citrix Systems Inc
    2017 : Avaya bankruptcy order releases old lien
    2018 : Citicorp lien released
    2022 : Citrix take private financing liens
         : Patent term expires 15 Dec 2022
    2023 : Goldman lien released and reassigned
         : Wilmington Trust notes lien recorded

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Contradiction check against the earlier sections of this analysis: none. The prior sections flagged the "current assignee Citrix Systems Inc." as a recorded-interest indication rather than a legal conclusion, and noted the chain consists of security interests and releases. The assignment feed confirms that — but it also shows the 2009-10-27 instrument is a true Assignment of Assignors' Interest, not a security agreement, so Citrix's ownership is a title transfer, not merely a lien. That strengthens, rather than contradicts, the prior "recorded owner = Citrix" statement.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The entire chain — from the original 2002-10-15 inventor assignment through Avaya's internal 2008-06-27 upstreaming, the 2009-10-27 Assignment of Assignors' Interest to Citrix Systems, Inc., and the 2022–2023 Cloud Software Group financing releases — is composed exclusively of operating companies whose business is making and selling software and hardware. There is no shell LLC, no chained-assignee cascade, no known NPE, no pre-suit transfer, and no defensive-aggregator end point; the current holder's flagship SSL-offloading load balancer plausibly practices the disclosure. The one caveat: the assertion half of that label is unproven for this patent — I located no suit asserting US 7,177,945, and the Avaya 2017/2023 bankruptcies and the 2024 Arlington Technologies portfolio sale both excluded it because it had already been divested in 2009, so the patent is best described as operating-company-held, non-asserted, and now expired (adjusted expiration 2022-12-15).

Two data gaps I will not paper over: (1) reel/frame numbers and correspondent names for all links except the two instrument references quoted above (012759/0141 and 062113/0001); (2) execution-vs-recording date pairs. Verify directly at the USPTO Assignment Center — assignmentcenter.uspto.gov and the indexed legacy UI at assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — searching application 09/921,832 and patent 7,177,945.

I'll search for the patent's cited references and prior art. Note upfront: the patent text supplied to me does not include the front-page "References Cited" section or the claims, so I'll search for those specifically.

The searches didn't surface the front-page "References Cited" list. Let me target that specifically.

I now have a lead (a Unified Patents list of "Patent Art" for the pre-grant publication). Let me pull the full cited-references list for US 7,177,945 from its Google Patents/FPO record.

I hit my search-step limit. Below is my best-supported analysis, with explicit flags on what I could and could not verify.

Prior art for US 7,177,945 — scope, sourcing, and a critical limitation

Sourcing note

The authoritative front-page "References Cited" section of US 7,177,945 was not present in the patent text supplied to me (it contained abstract, spec, and drawings description only — no claims, no reference list). My direct attempts to surface the printed front-page citation list were not successful before my search budget ran out.

The list below comes from the Unified Patents portal entry for the pre-grant publication US 2002/0073232 A1 (the published version of the same application, App. No. 09/921,832), which renders a "Patent Art (25)" set. The dates rendered there appear to be filing/priority dates, not publication dates. I am treating that set as a proxy for the patent's cited references, with these caveats:

1. Portal "Patent Art" sets can mix cited references (backward) with citing references (forward). Most entries here have filing dates before the '945 priority date (2000-08-04), which is consistent with backward citations — but I could not confirm each one's categorization.
2. A "US-7177945-B2" entry also appeared in the same set, which is anomalous for a pure backward-citation list. This supports the "mixed list" caution.
3. I did not retrieve the Foreign Patent Documents or Other References (NPL) sections.

⚠️ The claim limitation — flagged per the earlier section

As the previously generated Patent summary explicitly stated, I do not have authoritative claim text for US 7,177,945. The "'945" claim set was not in the supplied text and was not retrieved.

That means I cannot perform a true claim-by-claim § 102 anticipation analysis — § 102 anticipation requires that a single reference disclose every element of a specific claim, arranged as in the claim. Anything I say about "which claim(s) it potentially anticipates" is therefore a specification-grounded likelihood estimate, not a verified anticipation finding. Treat the "potential § 102 relevance" column as a research lead for a claim-charting exercise, not as an infringement-validity conclusion.

This is consistent with, and reinforces, the earlier section's uncertainty item #1.

Cited references (as reported), with analysis

The legal framework applicable here: US 7,177,945 has a 2001-08-03 filing date and 2000-08-04 priority date, so it is a pre-AIA patent. Candidate prior-art categories are pre-AIA § 102(b) (printed publication/patent more than one year before the US filing date) and § 102(e) (US patent granted or application publication on an application filed before the applicant's effective date). I flag the likely category for each; where a reference's actual US filing date differs from the priority date shown, the § 102(e) date is what matters and should be re-verified.

Group A — Session persistency across clear-text/encrypted transitions (core to the patent's stated novelty)

Group B — Cookie-based / payload-based load-balancing persistence (the "tagging" concept)

Group C — Cache-server load balancing and hot-content routing (the "digesting" concept)

Group D — Secure gateways, multi-level security, secure content delivery

Group E — Data/packet routing infrastructure

Group F — Publications with post-2000 publication dates (verify effective filing dates)

Highest-relevance candidates (my assessment)

If I had to rank for a claim-charting exercise — subject to the claim-text caveat — the most likely to matter are:

1. US 6,772,333 B1 (Zarbana) — because it addresses precisely the "clear-text↔encrypted session visibility to a load balancer" problem the '945 background frames as the unmet need. This is the reference most likely to be the § 102(e) obstacle to the patent's broadest independent claim.
2. US 2002/0040400 A1 (F5) — the cookie-borne load-balancing persistence reference; maps onto the tagging/persistence claims.
3. US 6,438,652 B1 (IBM) — cache-server load balancing; maps onto the hot-content/cache-routing claims.
4. US 6,108,703 (MIT) and US 6,754,699 (Akamai) — content replication/routing and CDN traffic management; map onto global-IP/replicated-server claims.
5. US 6,862,624 (Cisco) and US 6,330,606 (WebTV) — request-attribute-based flow direction and proxy dispatch.
6. US 6,510,464 (IV) and US 6,304,973 (Cryptek) — secure-gateway/multi-level-security elements.

Related co-pending applications named on the face of the patent

The '945 specification (captured in the supplied text) cross-references two concurrently filed applications by the same inventors: "High Performance Server Farm With Tagging and Pipelining" and "Intelligent Demand Driven Recognition of URL Objects in Connection with Oriented Transactions." The earlier section flagged that the numeric mapping (e.g., 7,225,350 / 7,062,570) is unverified, and I did not resolve it either. Note for validity analysis:

• Same-inventor, same-day-filed applications are not § 102(e) prior art to one another when the inventive entities are identical, but they can raise obviousness-type double patenting exposure. If any named inventor differs, § 102(e) could apply. This is worth checking against the official record.

What you must verify before relying on any of this

1. Obtain the actual claim set (USPTO PatentCenter / official copy). Without it, no § 102 anticipation statement can be made — my "potential § 102 relevance" entries are leads only.
2. Pull the printed front-page "References Cited" from the official patent (the Google Patents PDF or PatentCenter), to replace my Unified Patents "Patent Art (25)" proxy and to capture Foreign Patent Documents and NPL citations I could not retrieve.
3. Verify each reference's actual US filing date to confirm pre-AIA § 102(e) status, especially US 6,754,699 (filed 2000-07-18, ~2 weeks before the '945 priority date) and the 2002+ publications in Group F.
4. Distinguish applicant-cited from examiner-cited references; the mere presence on the face of the patent does not mean the examiner used it in a rejection, and does not mean it anticipates.

Standing disclaimers (consistent with the prior sections)

• No CAFC 2026 docket activity for US 7,177,945 was found in the earlier searches; treat as not found, not verified-negative.
• The "7177945" string also appears as a Japan Patent No. 7177945 (HP, fluid-ejection registers, issued 2022-11-24) and as an FDA FAERS case number — neither is this patent.
• The patent is Expired – Lifetime (adjusted expiration 2022-12-15), so § 102/§ 103 validity analysis is now largely of historical/portfolio interest rather than live-enforcement interest.

Would you like me to try to retrieve the actual front-page reference list and the claim set in a follow-up run (fresh search budget), so the § 102 mapping can be grounded in real claim language rather than the specification?

I'll first try to recover the prior-art citations on the face of this patent, since that grounds any §103 analysis.

I found the cited-references list on the Unified Patents portal. Let me now pin down the key references and try to recover the claim text.

Obviousness Analysis — US 7,177,945 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Scope, posture, and what I am working from

Carried-over limitation (material): I still do not have the authoritative claim text for US 7,177,945. The prior section flagged this and it remains true. The following analysis is therefore built on (a) the specification's own characterization of the invention, (b) the "Prior art keywords: informational, server, transaction, servers, tag" field shown on the Google Patents page for this patent, and (c) the cited-reference set recoverable from the family record. Every mapping below must be re-run against the actual claims and the file wrapper before it is relied upon. I will flag where the absence of claim text changes the conclusion.

Legal framework. Application 09/921,832 was filed 2001-08-03 with a §119(e) priority claim to provisional 60/223,087 (2000-08-04). This is a pre-AIA patent, so § 103(a) as it existed before the AIA governs, applied through Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). Note the timing point: the patent issued 2007-02-13, roughly two months before KSR. The examiner therefore examined under the pre-KSR teaching-suggestion-motivation regime. A KSR-era obviousness challenge would be materially stronger than the examination record reflects.

Litigation posture. As established earlier, no litigation or PTAB proceeding asserting this patent was located, and it expired (adjusted expiration 2022-12-15). There is accordingly no adjudicated validity determination to rely on, and no presumption-of-validity-defeating record. (Validity of an expired patent can still be litigated defensively against past-damages claims, and post-expiration IPRs have been instituted where past damages remain at stake — flagged as a general proposition, not verified for this patent.)

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

A POSITA at the August 2000 priority date would have: a bachelor's degree in CS/EE (or equivalent), plus roughly 2–4 years in network infrastructure; working knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP/1.1 (including persistent connections and pipelining), HTTP cookies, DNS, SSL/TLS 3.0, caching proxies, and L4/L7 load balancing. At that date, cookie-based "sticky" load balancing and URL-based content switching were shipping commercial features, not research topics (ArrowPoint/Cisco CSS, F5 BIG-IP, Alteon, Resonate Central Dispatch). This matters: the KSR "predictable combination of known elements" rationale applies with unusual force in a field this commercialized.

2. The specification's own admissions are the strongest § 103 material

The '945 Background is largely an admission of what the prior art already did. These statements are citable as admitted prior art and supply the "motivation" element for nearly every combination below:

The invention's asserted delta over this admitted base is therefore narrow: (i) terminating/decrypting SSL at the switch so the switch can see the URL/cookie invariants inside ciphertext; (ii) carrying SSL-session-ID + cookie persistency across the plain→cipher transition; (iii) demultiplexing multiple pipelined requests on one connection to different servers and re-serializing responses; (iv) the specific tag/digest/hotness data structures.

3. Prior art available against the 2000-08-04 priority date

Recovered from the cited-reference list for this family (via the Unified Patents record for US 2002/0073232 A1). Confidence flags are given because I could not open every reference.

Familial note (refines, does not contradict, the earlier section): the sibling application "High performance server farm with tagging and pipelining" corresponds to publication US 2002/0062372 A1 (Hong et al., May 2002). That is a same-family, commonly-owned document — relevant to obviousness-type double patenting / § 102(f)-type issues, not to § 103 as prior art. It also suggests the '945 claims are not the tagging/pipelining claims, which supports the inference below about where the '945 claims are likely aimed.

Inference about claim scope (flagged as inference). The Google Patents keyword field for this patent — informational, server, transaction, servers, tag — is generated from claim language, and the word "informational" does not appear in the specification text supplied to me. That suggests the claims recite a term such as "informational content/object/server" that is coined in the claims. Combined with the title's "multiplexed transaction persistency" and "secure commerce," the likely independent-claim core is: a switch that, for encrypted (and clear-text) transactions, extracts invariants, maintains per-transaction persistency across multiplexed/pipelined requests, and routes to farm servers. If that is right, the analysis below identifies both the easiest and the hardest claim elements to attack.

4. Combination A — Masters + Colby/ArrowPoint ('624/'264) + '652: the base switch

Motivation. Not merely "the references are in the same field." The '945 specification itself states the motivation (reduce origin-server load, keep sticky sessions, increase cache hit rates) and itself describes the constituent techniques as already known. Under KSR, where a technique was known to improve one device and would predictably improve a similar device in the same way, the combination is obvious. The only genuine delta here is the particular data structure, addressed in § 7 below.

Teaching away? None identified in this group. Masters and Colby point the same direction — application-layer, cookie/URL-aware persistence over a server farm.

5. Combination B — Masters (or Colby) + Brendel (US 6,772,333) : the "secure commerce" core

This is the combination that most directly reaches the asserted inventive core, because Brendel supplies nearly all of it.

Motivation. Two independent rationales: (1) both references are directed to the identical problem (preserving session affinity across the clear/cipher boundary in a server farm); (2) the '945 specification's own Background identifies that problem as the deficiency of the prior art, which is a classic statement of the problem to be solved — itself a permissible source of motivation.

The serious counter-argument (must be flagged). Brendel contains express language that cuts the other way:

"The load-balancer itself does not have to decrypt the messages between the client and server. Thus the load-balancer is not burdened with the computational effort required for decryption… security is enhanced since only the endpoints have the encryption keys… Only a 2-party rather than a more complex 3-party encryption scheme is used."

That is at least a colorable teaching away from interposing a decryption processor at the switch (which is what the '945 abstract claims as the invention). A patent owner would hammer this. The rebuttals available are:

• The teaching away is directed to avoiding the computational/security cost of holding keys, whereas the '945 approach offloads that cost to a dedicated cryptographic accelerator so the servers don't bear it (the '945 spec: "By offloading the cryptographic processing from servers, the resources of cryptographic acceleration can be better utilized by all servers in the farm"). Different problem, different trade-off — under KSR, "a given course of action often has simultaneous advantages and disadvantages, and this does not necessarily obviate motivation to combine."
• Brendel's teaching does not disparage off-box SSL termination generally; SSL-accelerator appliances (Rainbow, nCipher, F5, Array/Broadcom) were commercially established by 2000 — verify product/dates before relying on this.
• Critically, Masters has been read by PTAB petitioners as disclosing a decryption step on extracted data items. If that reading is adopted in this art, Masters alone materially moots the teaching-away point. Caveat: the petition excerpts I recovered were filed against a different patent (the "'955 patent"), and the Board's construction there is not binding here.

Bottom line for Combination B: the safest § 103 theory on this element is Masters + Brendel + RFC 2817/2818, with KSR used to neutralize the teaching-away. Absent the decryption-processor element, Brendel alone would come close to anticipation for the secure-persistency elements.

6. Combination C — Masters/Brendel + RFC 2616: the "multiplexed transaction" element

If (as the title and the "multiplexed" keyword suggest) the claims recite splitting multiple requests arriving on one persistent/pipelined connection and sending each to the server selected for that request's cookie, and then returning the responses in request order, this element is vulnerable:

• RFC 2616 (June 1999) governs persistent connections and pipelining, including the ordering requirement that responses be returned in the order requests were received.
• Masters supplies per-request cookie→server mapping.
• The combination is arithmetic: the switch must, per RFC 2616, preserve ordering; because different cookies on one connection map to different servers, it must demultiplex and re-serialize. That is a predictable consequence of applying a known per-request routing mechanism to a standardized connection type — squarely KSR / "In re KSR-consistent" obviousness, and arguably a mere design choice driven by protocol compliance.

Caveat: this is the element I would expect the patent owner to defend as the "real" invention (it is the one thing the title emphasizes), and the specification's treatment (FIG. 5 / step 524 narrative) is short. Without the claim text I cannot tell whether this element is in an independent claim or a dependent one. This is the single most consequential unknown in the whole analysis. Obtain the claims.

7. Combination D — hash/digest-indexed hot-URL table (Fan et al. / Cao & Irani / '652)

Motivation. Using a hash table to make lookup fast, rather than a linear table, is the paradigm case of "a predictable variation using a known technique to improve similar devices in the same way" (KSR). The frequency×recency eviction heuristic was published prior art. Nothing here amounts to an unpredictable result.

Weak point for a challenger: the combination of a cookie value (not just URL) into the digest key, plus cross-switch replication of digests, is the sort of implementation detail on which a patent owner could argue non-obviousness if the claims are narrowly drafted to that composite. Replication, however, is motivated by the admitted goal ("increase redundancy and performance… sharing the knowledge of server application established invariant… No one node is a single point of failure") and by the pre-existing distributed cache-digest literature.

8. Combination E — tagging mode

Masters alone — or Masters + Colby — reaches the tagging concept: a network device that inserts/rewrites a cookie in the server's response so that the client returns it on subsequent requests and the device routes directly to the identified server. The '945 refinements (choosing among multiple cookies by most-restrictive path attribute; generating the tag only on outbound responses; assigning each server a unique identifier) are implementation choices resolvable by the plain language of the HTTP cookie specification (RFC 2109 / RFC 2965, both pre-dating August 2000) and by straightforward engineering. Verify the RFC numbers/dates before relying on them.

9. Overall assessment

Most exposed claim features (would very likely be held obvious):

1. The base architecture — decryption processor + application-layer switch + server farm + cookie/URL parsing + persistence table with timestamps and expiry. Masters (+ Colby/ArrowPoint), reinforced by the '945 specification's own admissions.
2. Secure-session persistency across clear/cipher transition using SSL session ID and a server-assignment cookie. Brendel is nearly a verbatim match, including the identical statement of the IP-address-sharing problem.
3. Hash-indexed hot-URL table with hit counters, timestamps, and frequency/recency "hotness." Fan et al. / Cao & Irani / Masters / '652; predictable design choice.
4. Appending a compact server tag to the server's cookie. Masters insert/rewrite modes.

Least exposed (the likely locus of any surviving validity):

• The decryption-processor-at-the-switch element, because Brendel contains express language preferring not to decrypt at the load balancer. This is a real but rebuttable teaching-away argument.
• The multiplexed/pipelined demultiplex-and-reorder element, if it is recited in an independent claim with specificity (pending claim text).
• Any claim limited to the composite of digest-keyed table + tag generation + decryption + pipelined reordering, where the Federal Circuit might find the specific ordered combination non-obvious even though each element is known (In re Keller / In re Rouffet — the combination must be considered as a whole).

Secondary considerations. The likely pro-patent record — commercial success of cookie/web-switch products, industry adoption of SSL offload, and the "long-felt need" of cross-IP session crossing — is weak here because (a) the very products that succeeded (ArrowPoint/Cisco CSS, F5 BIG-IP, Alteon, Resonate) were the competitors whose features the '945 specification describes as pre-existing, so any nexus evidence would run against the patent; and (b) there is no litigation record of copying or licensing of this patent. Conversely, the absence of any assertion over a 15-year term is, at most, weak circumstantial evidence of narrowness — not a validity argument.

Net view: On the record recoverable here, a KSR-era § 103 challenge to the broadest independent claims would be more likely than not to succeed, primarily on Masters + Colby/ArrowPoint + Brendel, with the '945 specification's own Background admissions supplying most of the motivation and the "admitted elements." A challenge would be materially weaker against narrow dependent claims directed to the specific digest/tag data structures and to the pipelined-request demultiplexing/reordering — and that is where I would expect a patent owner to anchor.

10. Contradictions, corrections, and verification checklist

• No contradiction with the earlier sections was found. This section refines one item: the sibling application "High performance server farm with tagging and pipelining" is identified as publication US 2002/0062372 A1 (Hong et al., May 2002). The other sibling title remains unmapped — do not assume.
• Carried-over limitation reiterated: the claims of US 7,177,945 are still not in hand, and the specification text supplied omits the claims section. The combination analysis above is structured by specification element, not by claim number, for that reason.

Before this analysis is relied upon, obtain and check:

1. The full claim set from USPTO PatentCenter — number of independents, whether the pipelined-demultiplexing limitation is independent or dependent, and whether any independent claim requires the decryption processor (as opposed to "optionally").
2. The file wrapper — all § 103 rejections, the applicant's remarks, and the Examiner's statement of reasons for allowance. If the allowance turned on a specific argument about the decryption processor or the pipelined reordering, that argument is the KSR-era attack surface.
3. The exact filing/support dates of the Masters family members relied on (US 6,374,300; US 2001/0023442 A1; US 2002/0040400 A1) and of Brendel (US 6,772,333), to confirm § 102(e) availability as of 2000-08-04.
4. Titles and substance of the cited references I could only confirm by number: US 6,799,202; 6,754,699; 6,671,853; 6,640,239; 6,510,464; 6,304,973; 6,718,387; 5,924,885; 5,737,536; 5,825,772; 5,764,920; and publications US 2002/0026560 A1 and US 2002/0112154 A1 — and the exclusion of US 2004/0230566 A1 and US 6,785,722 B2 as post-priority.
5. RFC 2616 § 8.1.2.2 (pipelining/ordering) and RFC 2817 / RFC 2818 dates and text, plus Cao & Irani (1997) and Fan et al. (1998) citations, if they are to be used as primary or secondary references.
6. Any reexamination, reissue, or post-grant proceeding — not searched here.