US 7725110

I'll search for information about this specific patent number and any related litigation.

Let me get the specific claim text for US7725110 and check for any litigation dockets.

Let me look for the actual claims of US7725110 and check the USPTO/frandavenue listing.

US Patent 7,725,110 — Summary

Note on method: My primary source here is the full patent text supplied (Google Patents mirror, fetched 2026-09-24), which is authoritative and takes precedence over search snippets. I also ran live searches. I found no CAFC 2026 docket and no USPTO litigation/PTAB proceeding specifically naming US 7,725,110; the CAFC 2026 result that surfaced (Centripetal Networks v. Keysight, No. 2024-1930) is unrelated. So there is nothing litigation-specific to report for this number.

Bibliographic data (from the authoritative text)

⚠️ Discrepancy flag (literal, not auto-corrected): one third-party index (Unified Patents) lists the priority date for US‑7,725,110 as 2002-04-14. The authoritative patent text says 2002-04-15. I am treating 2002-04-15 as correct per the source of record.

Abstract (verbatim)

"A wireless network with multiple subscriber systems in a lobe pool may operate by determining a state of the wireless network, identifying a new condition, the new condition including a new demand condition or a new network health condition, determining whether the new condition has a threshold impact on operations of the wireless network or component subscriber systems of the wireless network, and if the threshold impact exists, reconfiguring the wireless network to accommodate the new condition."

Plain-language overview

The patent describes a self-reconfiguring wireless "mesh" network in which subscriber devices (phones, PDAs, set-top boxes/hubs, and base stations) communicate over directional antenna patterns called "lobes." The collective coverage of multiple cooperating devices is a "lobe pool." The core invention is a control loop: (1) sense the network's current state, (2) detect a new event/condition, (3) decide whether that condition crosses a "threshold impact," and (4) if so, reconfigure the network to handle it.

Independent claims — plain language

⚠️ Uncertainty: the authoritative text I was given is truncated in the detailed-description section and does not include the numbered claims. I therefore reconstructed the independent-claim scope from the Summary section (which mirrors the claim language) and from the related continuation US 8,346,273. I cannot give you verbatim claim text for US 7,725,110 itself — treat the following as a close paraphrase, not a quote.

1. Independent method claim (method of controlling a dynamically reconfigurable wireless network having multiple subscriber systems in a lobe pool):

   • determine a state of the wireless network;
   • identify a new condition — either a new demand condition or a new network health condition;
   • determine whether the new condition has a threshold impact on the network's operations or on its component subscriber systems; and
   • if the threshold impact exists, reconfigure the wireless network to accommodate the new condition.

2. Likely additional independents: The patent family (e.g., US 8,346,273) separately claims (a) a method for managing an event in a wireless mesh network — receiving a request from a node outside the mesh that would consume available bandwidth, determining the impact, identifying a second configuration that reduces the impact, configuring the mesh into that second configuration, and accommodating the event; and (b) a corresponding base station with a communication device and controller performing those steps. Whether US 7,725,110 itself contains both a method claim and an apparatus/base-station claim set is something I could not confirm from the available text — flagging that as unresolved.

Representative dependent-claim features (from the Summary, which lists them as optional implementations):

• Network state = subscriber count in the lobe pool, bandwidth utilization, channel allocation info, atmospheric/transmission parameters, or signal strength.
• New condition = changing atmospheric conditions, new subscriber(s) joining the lobe pool, new utilization level, a demanding transmission, or added channel usage.
• Threshold impact = service interruption, loss of service, or meeting a pre-identified "alarm condition" criterion.
• Reconfiguration = moving a subscriber from one lobe pool to another, changing allocated bandwidth, splitting/restructuring a lobe pool into multiple pools, reorienting a lobe, setting priority, or delaying/rejecting the new condition (including if it would exceed a threshold level of delay).

Bottom line

The record confirms the bibliography, abstract, assignee chain (AOL → Microsoft → Microsoft Technology Licensing), and the inventive concept, all grounded in the authoritative patent text. I could not retrieve the verbatim numbered claims of US 7,725,110, and I found no CAFC 2026 or USPTO proceeding specific to it. If you need exact claim text, the reliable route is the granted patent's claims page on USPTO PatentCenter / Google Patents (the PDF), or the published application US 2007/0149207 A1.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 7725110. Let me search multiple sources.

Litigation Search Results — US Patent No. 7,725,110

Bottom line: Based on the searches I was able to run, I found no known district court litigation (or ITC/CAFC proceeding) in which US Patent No. 7,725,110 was asserted as a patent-in-suit or challenged. I am reporting that as a "no known litigation" result rather than a confirmed negative, subject to the search limitations noted below.

What I searched

• Unified Patents litigation/patent portal (per your instruction, e.g., portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist and the patent page), queried with the exact number 7725110.
• General web queries for: US patent 7725110 litigation; "7725110" patent lawsuit defendant; "7,725,110" patent infringement; AOL wireless mesh network patent litigation; Weigand wireless mesh patent assertion litigation Microsoft.
• Google Patents / Justia / USPTO.report records for the '110 patent and its family.

What the searches actually returned

• No case hits for the '110 patent itself. The results that matched "110" or "7725110" were:
  • An unrelated Beacon Navigation case (E.D. Mich., e.g. Case No. 2:13-cv-11410-MAG-EAS) involving a different patent referred to as the '110 patent (a tire-repair/TEK Global matter appears in some "[110]" hits) — not US 7,725,110.
  • Unified Patents PTAB/patent pages that cite US 7,725,110 only as a reference/citation within other patents' prior-art lists (e.g., Digital Global Systems' spectrum-analysis patents US 10,459,020 and US 12,243,406) — these are citations, not litigation.
  • Golden wiki and Justia pages showing the patent's bibliographic data only.

Relevant ownership / status facts (grounded, not litigation)

• Patent: US 7,725,110 B2, "Dynamically managing and reconfiguring wireless mesh networks"; inventor Gilbert G. Weigand; app. No. 11/561,163; filed Nov. 17, 2006; granted May 25, 2010; priority date Apr. 15, 2002 (continuation of Ser. No. 10/414,433; provisional 60/372,146). Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7725110/en
• Assignees: originally AOL Inc.; reassigned to Microsoft Corporation (2012) and then Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (2014).
• Family members (continuations): US 8,023,957; US 8,346,273; US 8,831,623; US 9,037,146.
• Status: Expired – Lifetime (adjusted expiration Aug. 21, 2025).
• I did not find any recorded reexamination, IPR, or PGR proceeding against the '110 patent in the results returned.

Caveats / limitations

1. I hit a tooling/step limit before I could complete exhaustive queries against PACER/CAFC dockets and the full Unified Patents litigation case list, so I cannot guarantee the negative is complete. If litigation exists, it is likely to be older AOL/Microsoft-era activity, and the patents most likely to have been asserted are the family members (e.g., 8,023,957 / 8,346,273), not the '110 patent specifically.
2. The web results that superficially matched "110"/"7725110" were for different patents; per your instruction I did not conflate them.

Recommended next checks (to confirm the negative)

• Query PACER for the exact patent number across all districts.
• Query the Unified Patents litigation case list filtered by patents=7725110 directly.
• Query CAFC and USPTO PatentCenter / Global Dossier for any appeals or post-grant proceedings tied to the application number 11/561,163.

If you'd like, I can run those targeted docket queries next so I can either confirm "no litigation" or populate the plaintiff/defendant/jurisdiction/case number/filing date fields for any case I locate.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 7,725,110: 0 (zero). The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block — the canonical list from the USPTO Open Data Portal — returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and my independent web searches (including patent-specific queries against Unified Patents' portal and general PTAB docket references) surfaced no petition, institution decision, FWD, or appeal naming the '110 patent. There is therefore no breakdown by status to report: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. The bottom line for a defendant is not "the patent is hardened by surviving IPRs" — it is that the patent was never challenged at the PTAB at all, which is itself a meaningful signal about how (and how hard) this patent was ever asserted. Two independent facts also materially change your posture: (1) all claims remain untested at the Board and therefore un-narrowed by any AIA estoppel or claim-cancellation, but (2) per the patent's own legal-status record, the patent expired on 2025-08-21 ("Expired - Lifetime," adjusted expiration), meaning post-expiration conduct cannot support infringement liability at all. Read together, the realistic threat profile is a stale-expiration / historical-damages claim, not an ongoing-injunction claim.

Caveat on sourcing: this is a negative finding. I could not access the PTAB E2E docket directly in this session, and the ODP ingest is described as potentially incomplete. The absence of AIA proceedings should be independently confirmed against PTAB E2E and the USPTO PTAB Decisions library before you rely on it in a filing or an opinion letter.

(No proceeding sections follow — the structured block returned zero proceedings, and no proceeding numbers are invented here.)

Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim of US 7,725,110 — independent and dependent — is UNTESTED at the PTAB. No claim has been canceled, disclaimed through an AIA trial, or held patentable over a PTAB challenge. The claim set as it issued on 2010-05-25 is the claim set you would face in litigation. That cuts both ways: you inherit no helpful FWD to cite, but you also face no holding that the claims are valid over art (an FWD sustaining claims would have been a real burden — the Board's patentability determinations carry weight and, under Aqua Products/practice, a petitioner bears the burden of proving unpatentability). Because there is no IPR, there is also no § 315(e)(2) estoppel on anyone — no prior petitioner is barred, and you are free to raise any § 102/§ 103 ground over patents and printed publications in an IPR, or any ground (including § 112 and non-patent prior art) in district court. That is an unencumbered defensive runway.

The more important fact is expiration. The Google Patents legal-status record for 7,725,110 lists status "Expired - Lifetime" with an adjusted expiration of 2025-08-21. Priority is claimed to provisional 60/372,146 (2002-04-15) via application 10/414,433 (filed 2003-04-15), and the '110 is a continuation filed 2006-11-17. If the patent is indeed expired and past any term-adjustment extension, then as of today (2026-09-29) there is no prospective infringement — no injunction, no ongoing royalties. The only live theory would be damages for acts during the patent term, and 35 U.S.C. § 286 caps that recovery at six years before the complaint is filed, which today reaches back only to roughly 2020-09. Practical corollary: if a demand letter accuses current products or current network operations of infringing the '110, that theory is defective on its face and is a strong candidate for a declaratory-judgment posture rather than a settlement. Confirm the expiration date from the USPTO Patent Term Adjustment / maintenance-fee record before acting on it, and check whether any continuation in this family (US 8,023,957; US 8,346,273; US 8,831,623; US 9,037,146 — all listed as family members on the Google Patents page) carries a later expiration that could still be asserted.

Pattern signals and ownership. There is no repeated-petitioner pattern because there is no petitioner at all, and no defensive-aggregator chain (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) on this patent that I could find; the Unified Patents portal hit merely lists the '110 as a citation in the file history of an unrelated later patent. The patent's current assignee is Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (via AOL Inc. → Microsoft Corporation → Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC per the assignment record), i.e., a large operating company's licensing arm, not a patent-assertion entity. That combination — never IPR'd, expired, and held by a sophisticated operating-company licensor — is consistent with a patent that was monetized selectively or not at all, rather than one that was litigated into the ground. Treat the absence of IPRs as weak evidence of strength: patents that are heavily asserted almost invariably attract AIA trials, so a zero-proceeding record is a more reliable signal that the patent was never a priority assertion target than that it is bulletproof.

Recommended next steps

• Verify the negative finding before relying on it. Pull the application's "Proceedings" and "Continuity Data" tabs on PTAB E2E for application 11/561,163 and confirm no IPR/PGR/CBM is pending or terminated, then cross-check the USPTO PTAB Decisions library and CourtListener for any appeal. Do this for the whole family (8,023,957 / 8,346,273 / 8,831,623 / 9,037,146) — a defendant should not concede the point for the family based on the '110 alone.
• Pin the expiration date with the PTO, not with a search result. Request or download the Patent Term Adjustment determination and the maintenance-fee payment history for 7,725,110 and each continuation. A confirmed 2025-08-21 expiration converts most assertion scenarios into a § 286 look-back question and, for post-expiration conduct, a non-infringement position you can assert affirmatively.
• If a demand letter cites the '110: (a) check whether the accused conduct is post-2025-08-21 (if so, there is no infringement to enjoin and no ongoing royalty); (b) if the accused conduct predates expiration, verify the six-year § 286 window and demand the plaintiff's claim charts for specific claims; and (c) treat the letter's silence about the patent's expired status as a credibility data point. There is no FWD to cite — because none exists — so your earliest-best defense is statutory expiration plus the six-year bar, not a PTAB estoppel narrative.
• If the patent owner instead asserts a live continuation: that is a different posture — no PTAB activity of record means the full IPR toolkit (any § 102/§ 103 combination over patents and printed publications, with no § 325(d)/§ 315(e) baggage) remains open, and the § 315(b) one-year bar from service of an infringement complaint will govern your filing window.

Explicit uncertainty: I did not confirm any of the following with high confidence and you should not treat them as established — (i) that the PTAB E2E docket contains zero family-wide proceedings (only that the supplied ODP block and my searches show none for the '110), (ii) the exact adjusted expiration date and its PTA derivation, and (iii) whether any litigation involving the '110 ever occurred (my searches returned unrelated litigation — FotoMedia, I/P Engine, Beneficial Innovations — none of which put the '110 at issue). Items (i)–(iii) are all verifiable in minutes and should be verified before any substantive reliance.

I'll research the assignment/ownership record for US 7,725,110, focusing on reel/frame numbers and correspondent-of-record details.

Let me dig for the specific assignment abstract of title and reel/frame for this patent, plus the AOL–Microsoft 2012 patent deal context.

Let me look for the specific AOL→Microsoft 2012 assignment record and any family-level assignment abstracts.

I was able to reconstruct the ownership chain from the authoritative Google Patents legal-events record (which mirrors the USPTO Assignment Center abstract of title), plus independent corroboration of the 2012 AOL→Microsoft transaction from SEC/Business Wire filings. I hit the tool-step limit before I could pull the raw reel/frame identifiers from Legacy-Assignments/Assignment Center itself, so those specific fields are flagged as unretrieved below. I did not fabricate them.

Inventors

• Gilbert G. Weigand — sole named inventor on US 7,725,110 B2.
  • Employer at filing: America Online, Inc. (AOL). The inventor's rights were assigned to America Online, Inc. by an assignment of inventors' interest recorded 2006-12-04 (per the Google Patents legal-events record for application 11/561,163). The claimed priority runs to provisional US 60/372,146 (filed 2002-04-15, "Wireless Viral Mesh Networks"), and to non-provisional US 10/414,433 (filed 2003-04-15), so Weigand was an AOL-side inventor from the priority date forward.
  • Pattern check: There is only one inventor, so the "all inventors departed within 12 months" fire-sale precursor cannot be assessed from the assignment record — it would require personnel/employment data the patent record does not contain. Not determinable / no unusual pattern evident.
  • Note: I could not confirm from any source whether Weigand was listed as an AOL employee on the face of the provisional; the employer attribution rests on the recorded assignment to America Online, Inc.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: AOL Inc. (successor by change of name from America Online, Inc. → AOL LLC → AOL Inc.; see 2009 chain below).
• Product / business: AOL was an online-services and internet-access provider (subscription dial-up/broadband access, portal/content, messaging). I found no evidence that AOL shipped a commercial product embodying the wireless-mesh claims (the patent's lobe-pool/directional-antenna relay subject matter does not map to AOL's dial-up/portal business). Embodiment in a shipped product: unclear / likely not.
• Current status: AOL Inc. was acquired by Verizon (June 2015) and folded into Verizon Media (Oath); the AOL brand and assets moved to Yahoo Inc. after Apollo Global Management's 2021 acquisition — general public knowledge, not from the assignment record. AOL did not enter bankruptcy; the 2012 patent sale was a solvent, tax-structured portfolio monetization, not a Chapter 7/11 fire-sale.

Assignment timeline

⚠️ Reel/frame identifiers: NOT RETRIEVED. The US 7,725,110 record is present in the Assignment Center/Google Patents legal-events feed, but I was unable to pull the raw reel/frame numbers or execution dates for each link before tool exhaustion. The dates below are the recordation events shown in the Google Patents legal-events feed (which is populated from the USPTO assignment record). Treat reel/frame as to-be-confirmed; do not cite them as verified.

• executed unknown / recorded 2006-12-04 — Reel unretrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of inventors' interest
  • Assignor: Gilbert G. Weigand
  • Assignee: America Online, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — this recording predates the NPE-relevant links; no flag possible.
  • Context: standard employment/inventor assignment at filing.

• executed unknown / recorded 2009-12-14 — Reel unretrieved

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement (grant of security interest / lien, not a title transfer)
  • Assignor: AOL Inc.; AOL Advertising Inc.; Bebo, Inc.; Going, Inc.; ICQ LLC; Lightningcast LLC; MapQuest, Inc.; Netscape Communications Corporation; Quigo Technologies LLC; Sphere Source, Inc.; Tacoda LLC; Truveo, Inc.; Yedda, Inc. (portfolio-wide grant)
  • Assignee: Bank of America, N.A., as Collateral Agent
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: securitization / credit-facility collateral — encumbers the patent but does not transfer ownership.

• executed unknown / recorded 2009-12-31 — Reel unretrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: America Online, Inc.
  • Assignee: AOL LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: internal reorganization / change of name only — no change in beneficial ownership.

• executed unknown / recorded 2009-12-31 — Reel unretrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignor's Interest
  • Assignor: AOL LLC
  • Assignee: AOL Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: internal reorganization (AOL LLC → AOL Inc., the post-Time-Warner-spinoff entity).

• executed unknown / recorded 2010-11-16 — Reel unretrieved

  • Conveyance: Termination and Release of Security Interest in Patent Rights
  • Assignor: Bank of America, N.A.
  • Assignee: the AOL entity group (release)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: lien release — clears the 2009-12-14 security interest.

• executed ~2012-06-15 (deal closing) / recorded 2012-08-09 — Reel unretrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: AOL Inc.
  • Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: acquisition — part of the closed AOL→Microsoft portfolio sale of 800+ patents for $1.056B (businesswire/Business Wire and AOL Form 8-K, June 15, 2012). AOL took back a perpetual license to the sold patents.

• executed unknown / recorded 2012-11-19 — Reel unretrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: AOL Inc.
  • Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: acquisition — second recording of the same AOL→Microsoft transaction. ⚠️ Unresolved: two separate AOL→Microsoft recordation events appear in 2012. Likely explanations are (a) the deal's tax structure, which AOL disclosed as partly a sale of the stock of an AOL subsidiary, or (b) a batched/corrective second reel. I could not confirm which, and I am not asserting either.

• executed 2014-10-14 / recorded 2014-12-09 — Reel 034541/0477 ⚠️ probable-but-not-confirmed for '110

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor: Microsoft Corporation
  • Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052)
  • Correspondent: CPA Global Limited, Liberation House, Castle Street, St Helier, JE1 1BL, Jersey
  • Context: internal IP-holding reorganization. ⚠️ Caveat: the reel/frame 034541/0477, execution date 2014-10-14, recordation date 2014-12-09, and CPA Global correspondent were observed on a sibling Microsoft application (Ser. 10/369,006) in the same December 2014 recording wave — not read off the US 7,725,110 abstract itself. The Google Patents legal event for '110 matches on date (2014-12-09) and on the same assignor/assignee pair, so this is very likely the same recording, but I have not verified it against the '110 reel. CPA Global (Jersey) as correspondent is a bulk-recording agent, not an NPE-run firm.

Bottom line for this section: records exist for AOL-side provenance, a 2009 lien/name chain, the 2012 Microsoft acquisition, and a 2014 reorganization into Microsoft Technology Licensing. No recorded post-2014 transfer, and no transfer to any third-party/NPE entity.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7725110
    2002 : Provisional filed by Weigand
    2003 : Non-provisional filed
    2006 : Continuation filed
         : Inventor assigns to America Online
    2009 : America Online renamed AOL LLC
         : AOL LLC to AOL Inc internal transfer
         : Bank of America security interest recorded
    2010 : US 7725110 issued
         : BoA security interest released
    2012 : AOL sells portfolio to Microsoft
         : Second AOL to Microsoft recording
    2014 : Microsoft to Microsoft Technology Licensing
    2025 : Patent expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. The chain terminates at Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, a captive IP-holding subsidiary of an operating company. It is a holding entity, but it is not anonymous, not a single-purpose Delaware/Texas licensing shell acting for unknown principals, and has no registered-agent-only address. No "IP/Licensing/Holdings" shell appears in the AOL→Microsoft→MTL path beyond MTL itself, which is well-documented as Microsoft's own holding company. Evidence: 2014-12-09 recorded assignment (assignee address One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052).

2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. No assignee in the chain matches Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or any Spangenberg entity. Assignees are AOL entities, Bank of America (collateral agent), Microsoft Corporation, and Microsoft Technology Licensing. None appears on Unified Patents / RPX high-frequency-plaintiff lists for this chain.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Unclear / not retrieveable. I could not retrieve the correspondent-of-record for the AOL-era or 2012 recordings. The only correspondent surfaced is CPA Global Limited (Jersey) on the probable 2014-12-09 Microsoft→MTL recording, which is a bulk portfolio-recording agent, not an NPE-linked attorney. No recurrence finding can be made; this signal is unresolved.

4. Cascading transfers (<24 months through chained LLCs) — Not present. The 2012 and 2014 events are, respectively, a single corporate portfolio sale and a single internal reorganization, not a chain of serial LLC-to-LLC assignments. No shared principal/correspondent "shell cascade" is visible.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. I again found no infringement suit naming US 7,725,110 (consistent with the earlier litigation section); the 2012/2014 transfers are not timed to a lawsuit against this patent.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. AOL's 2012 sale was a solvent, auctioned, tax-structured monetization (proceeds distributed to shareholders; AOL took a license back), not a bankruptcy sale. AOL did not file Chapter 7/11 in connection with it.

7. Privateering — Not present (at most, weak negative). AOL transferred the patent to Microsoft, an operating company, with a license retained by AOL — the opposite of transferring to an NPE to assert on AOL's behalf. Microsoft retained this patent (it went to MTL in 2014) rather than routing it to an asserter; the sibling AOL patents that went to Facebook also went to an operating company.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at a captive operating-company IP subsidiary.

Verdict

Defensive / non-asserting. — stated with a definitional caveat noted below.

The chain runs Weigand → America Online/AOL (2006–2009 name/reorg steps) → AOL Inc. → Microsoft Corporation (recorded 2012-08-09 and 2012-11-19, the $1.056B AOL portfolio sale) → Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (probable reel 034541/0477, executed 2014-10-14 / recorded 2014-12-09). Every assignee is an operating company (or that company's captive holding subsidiary) or a collateral agent; no NPE-list entity, no anonymous shell LLC, no litigation-timed transfer appears, and I found no assertion of this patent. It is effectively non-asserting.

⚠️ Caveat on the label: the standard taxonomy's "Defensive / non-asserting" is defined as terminating at a defensive aggregator. This chain does not — it terminates at Microsoft's own IP holding company, which is an operating-company vehicle, not an RPX/AST/Unified-style aggregator. So the verdict captures the operative outcome (not an NPE chain; no assertion) rather than a literal defensive-aggregator terminus. If you require strict label adherence, the honest alternative is Insufficient data, because I could not pull the reel/frame identifiers from the Assignment Center directly and am relying on the Google Patents legal-events mirror. Either way, there is no NPE evidence.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "7725110"; legacy mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). To close the gaps I flagged, pull the abstract of title for application 11/561,163 and capture the reel/frame + execution date + correspondent for the seven AOL-era/2012 links, and confirm reel 034541/0477 covers this patent.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 7,725,110 from USPTO/Google Patents records.

Let me pull the citation tables directly from the patent's USPTO/Google Patents record.

Prior-art analysis for US 7,725,110 — result and honest limitation

I need to be straight with you about what I could and could not obtain. I was not able to retrieve the actual front-page "References Cited" (patent-citation) list for US 7,725,110 from the USPTO/Google Patents record within this session. The three searches I ran all returned the same Google Patents "Definitions" section (the machine-generated summary), the patent's bibliographic data, and the third-party Golden wiki mirror — none of which reproduced the citation table. I also hit the tooling step limit before I could open the full-text/PDF record or a mirror that tabulates citations.

Because the governing rule is do not fabricate identifiers or citations, I am not going to produce a list of reference numbers, dates, and § 102 mappings I did not actually verify. Inventing "US X,XXX,XXX — anticipates claim 1" entries would be exactly the fabrication the brief forbids. Everything below is either (a) grounded in the authoritative patent text supplied, or (b) clearly labeled as an analytical framework, not a citation list.

⚠️ Contradiction/limitation flag (consistent with the earlier sections): The authoritative text supplied is truncated in the description and does not contain the claims, and I have not independently seen the "References Cited" table. So the two inputs the task depends on — the exact claim language and the exact cited references — are both still unverified for this record. That gap should be resolved before any reliance is placed on an anticipation analysis.

What the record does establish (grounded)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7725110/en

The classifications themselves tell you where the examiner searched, which is the best grounded indicator of the prior-art field: network configuration/management triggered by conditions (H04L 41/06, 41/08, 43/*), network planning/sectorization/beam-steering (H04W 16/18, 16/28), traffic management in changing-topology/ad-hoc networks (H04W 28/02), routing via selective relaying through a node to reach a base station (H04W 40/22), and WLAN / access-point selection (H04W 84/12, 48/16).

Why the citation list matters, and what an § 102 case would require

Under 35 U.S.C. § 102, a single prior-art reference anticipates a claim only if it discloses every element of that claim, arranged as in the claim. For this patent, the independent claim (per the Summary section, which mirrors claim language) requires, in combination:

1. determining a state of the wireless network;
2. identifying a new condition that is a new demand condition or a new network health condition;
3. determining whether the new condition has a threshold impact on the network or its component subscriber systems; and
4. if the threshold impact exists, reconfiguring the wireless network to accommodate the new condition.

That is a multi-step conditional control loop with a "threshold impact" gate. § 102 anticipation therefore demands a reference that discloses that specific decision structure — not merely:

• directional antennas / "lobes" and sectorization (H04W 16/28 art), or
• ad-hoc/mesh relaying where one node relays another to a base station (H04W 40/22 art), or
• generic bandwidth-allocation or admission control.

Those three categories are where the bulk of the cited art in a patent like this typically sits, and they are also the categories where a § 102 (rather than § 103 obviousness) case is hardest, because each individual reference tends to show only one limb of the loop. Without the actual cited references I cannot responsibly assign any specific reference to a specific claim. I am flagging that explicitly rather than guessing.

What I recommend to complete the task (and confirm the record)

To produce the reference-by-reference table you asked for, the exact citation data must be pulled from a source that actually reproduces it:

1. USPTO PatentCenter — application 11/561,163 → "References Cited" / front page of the granted patent (the paper "References Cited" list is authoritative; Google Patents' "Patent Citations" table is a mirror).
2. Google Patents → open https://patents.google.com/patent/US7725110/en and use the "Patent Citations" and "Non-Patent Citations" tables (these are generated from the front page and from family data).
3. The granted PDF (patentimages) — the front-page "References Cited" block and the examiner's cited-reference list.
4. Cross-check against the family members US 8,023,957 / 8,346,273 / US 8,831,623 / US 9,037,146, whose "References Cited" tables will largely overlap and can help reconstruct the '110 list if the '110 page is hard to load.

Once I have that table, I can do exactly what you asked — for each reference: full citation, filing/publication date, one-line technical description, and which claim(s) it could raise a § 102 anticipation question against (with the caveat that genuine anticipation requires the reference to disclose all elements, so most citations will be § 103-obviousness fodder rather than true § 102 references).

Bottom line

• I searched for US 7,725,110 and confirmed its identity and bibliographic record, but the specific front-page prior-art citation list was not retrievable in this session, so I have no verified reference set to report.
• Rather than fabricate citations, dates, or § 102 mappings, I am reporting this as an unresolved gap. If you authorize another pass (or paste the "References Cited" table / claims), I will immediately produce the full reference-by-reference anticipation analysis you specified.
• Everything asserted above about the patent itself is grounded in the authoritative Google Patents full text; nothing in it should be read as a claim that a particular prior-art document was cited by the examiner.

I'll research the prior art references cited in US 7,725,110 so I can ground the obviousness analysis in actual references.

Now let me confirm what the key cited references actually disclose, so the combinations are grounded.

Obviousness Analysis — US 7,725,110 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Important framing and caveats (read first). This is a preliminary § 103 framework, not a final validity opinion.

1. Prior-art source. You asked me to use the "Prior Art" section of the Google Patents page. The authoritative patent text you supplied is truncated in the detailed-description section and stops before the citations/"Cited By" tables, so I reconstructed the references on the face from the same family's records on USPTO.report and cross-checked via live search. That reconstructed set is cited below with URLs.
2. Claim text. Consistent with the earlier section of this analysis, I could not retrieve the verbatim numbered claims of US 7,725,110 in this session. I analyze the independent claim as the "determine state → identify new condition → threshold impact → reconfigure" loop (mirrored in the patent's Summary and in publication US 2004/014491 A1, now US 7,151,938), and I flag where the exact scope matters. I did retrieve verbatim claims of family member US 8,023,957 and US 7,151,938, which are useful proxies. If 7,725,110's claims differ materially (e.g., the "request from a device outside the mesh" limitation of 8,023,957), conclusions change — that is flagged in § 6.
3. Critical date. Priority is 2002-04-15 (provisional 60/372,146) per the authoritative text; the earlier section flagged a third-party index (Unified Patents) listing 2002-04-14. For § 103, art must predate the critical date (2002-04-15 for claims supported by the provisional; potentially 2003-04-15, the 10/414,433 filing date, for claims not so supported). The date each reference was filed/priority-dated matters as much as its publication date, and the "References Cited" list on a 2010 patent mixes pre- and post-2002 items (see § 2).

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

At the 2002–2003 critical date, a POSITA would be a wireless/RF engineer or network architect with a bachelor's degree in EE/CS (or equivalent) and ~2–5 years' experience in one or more of: IEEE 802.11 WLAN/mesh systems, cellular radio-resource management (channel allocation, congestion control, handover), and antenna beamforming/directional coverage. This person would be familiar with the standard texts and standards (802.11a/b), with adaptive channel-allocation and congestion-control literature, and with multi-hop/relay ("opportunistic") network literature. This matters because several of the elements below were routine engineering concerns in that community.

2. The prior art on the face of the patent (reconstructed)

From the family records (US 8,023,957 / US 7,151,938 "References Cited," https://uspto.report/patent/grant/8023957 and https://uspto.report/patent/grant/[7151938](/patent/7151938)), the U.S. patent publications and patents cited include:

Other: International Search Report, PCT/US03/11446, mailed Nov 20, 2003.

⚠️ Flag: the USPTO.report header conflates "References Cited" and "Referenced By." Items issued/published after 2003 (e.g., Berkman 2008, Wang 2009, and most 2004–2009 grants) are only prior art if their filing/priority date precedes the critical date under § 102(e). Each must be date-checked. I could not complete that per-reference verification in this session (step limit).

3. Element-by-element mapping of the independent claim

Assume independent claim 1 is the loop: (a) determine a state of the wireless network; (b) identify a new condition = a new demand condition or a new network health condition; (c) determine whether it has a threshold impact; (d) if so, reconfigure (e.g., move a subscriber to another lobe pool, change bandwidth, split the pool, reorient a lobe, set priority).

Read-through: elements (a), (c), (d) are squarely in the well-trodden cellular resource-management prior art; element (b′)'s atmospheric aspect is the only element for which I cannot presently point to a specific cited reference.

4. Candidate combinations and motivation to combine

Combination 1 — Larsen (2001/0036810) primary + Andersson (6,519,461) secondary.

• Larsen supplies the multi-station/relay network: mobile stations relay for one another, develop gradients to base stations, exchange probe/neighbor information, and reserve resources per QoS/throughput — i.e., a system that determines state and routes around congestion. (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20010036810A1/en)
• Andersson supplies the threshold-triggered congestion-control / reassignment loop: detect a load condition, compare against a threshold, and move/reselect.
• Motivation: both address the same problem (maintaining service quality under variable load in a wireless network) and both operate on the same kind of data (measured load/link quality). Combining them is the predictable use of a known congestion-control trigger with a known relay-routing state estimator — a KSR "familiar elements, predictable result" combination. The Larsen reference itself even names "resource utilisation on relay links" as a routing cost, which supplies the design incentive to offload a congested link/node.

Combination 2 — Feuerstein (6,141,565) or Reudink (5,889,494) [adaptive/distributed resource allocation] + Benveniste (6,112,092) [channel/resource assignment] + Larsen (mesh/relay).

• Feuerstein/Reudink give determine state → allocate/reallocate channels; Benveniste gives assignment decisions under measured conditions; Larsen extends this to a relay/lobe structure. The combination yields all four steps for the demand-condition species.
• Motivation: adaptive channel allocation was a recognized solution to capacity/loading problems; applying it to a relay-based coverage structure is a known technique applied to a known device ready for improvement (KSR). Same field, overlapping problem, expected benefit (better utilization/lower blocking).

Combination 3 — Combination 1 + a link-adaptation/atmospheric reference (to reach the dependent atmospheric claims).

• Needed to meet claim dependencies reciting "atmospheric parameters … changing atmospheric condition" (cf. 7,151,938 claim 10; 7,725,110's counterpart dependent claim). I did not verify a cited reference that discloses weather/atmospheric-based reconfiguration. The patent itself says atmospheric conditions "may be measured by the signal strength on a receiver, or accessing a weather/atmospheric database that provides predicted atmospheric conditions" — if that was known, a POSITA could combine it; but on the citations I can see, this element is the most vulnerable to a non-obviousness argument.

Apparatus/means claims. If independent claim 1 is obvious, the parallel "wireless network controller" claim (state/identification/threshold/reconfiguration "processors") and the means-plus-function claim are obvious for the same reasons — the processors recite the same functional steps (cf. US 7,151,938 claims 27 and 54). A § 112(f) analysis would map "means for…" to the disclosed controllers/algorithms, but that does not change the § 103 result.

5. Why a POSITA would have been motivated (KSR rationales)

1. Common problem, common field. All the primary references address quality-of-service under variable load in wireless networks.
2. Predictable results. Threshold-triggered reallocation and relay re-routing are known to reduce congestion; combining them changes nothing in their respective principles of operation.
3. Design incentive / market forces. Capacity and coverage demands in 802.11/cellular deployments in 2002 directly drove load-balancing, sectorization, and relaying.
4. The references themselves point the way. Larsen's cost function explicitly includes link resource utilization → an incentive to shift load; congestion-control art explicitly teaches reassignment when a threshold is crossed.
5. "Obvious to try." Self-organizing/self-optimizing networks were an active goal; trying threshold-based reconfiguration across a relay-based coverage structure was a finite, predictable design choice.
6. Terminology is not patentable weight. "Lobe pool" and "threshold impact" appear to be labels for aggregates of directional coverage and for hysteresis/impact thresholds; under KSR, coining terminology for known concepts does not confer non-obviousness.

6. Countervailing points (do not overstate obviousness)

• The art was already before the examiner, and the claims still issued. These references (or most of them) were cited and considered during prosecution of the family, and the parent US 7,151,938 issued with materially narrower claims than the broad published claims (compare publication 2004/014491's broad "determining a state … threshold impact … reconfiguring" claim with US 7,151,938's issued claim 1, which requires a first lobe pool with a base station, identification of a first device, a capability check for a second lobe pool, an estimated impact on the second pool, and a revised threshold). That narrowing is evidence that the examiner did not find the broad genus allowable over these very references — but it also shows the broad genus was the rejected/withdrawn scope, which supports an obviousness challenge to any 7,725,110 claim that recites only the broad loop.
• Scope ambiguity cuts both ways. If 7,725,110's actual claims resemble US 8,023,957's claim 1 — "receiving … a request from a device outside of the wireless mesh network to support an event requiring consumption of bandwidth … determining whether an alternative configuration exists … that reduces the impact to below the threshold …" (verbatim from https://uspto.report/patent/grant/8023957) — then an obviousness attack must additionally show art for the "outside-of-the-mesh request" and "alternative configuration at a particular location" limitations, for which Combinations 1–2 are weaker.
• Objective indicia. The earlier section found no known litigation, reexam, or IPR on 7,725,110, so there is no record of secondary considerations (long-felt need, copying, commercial success) either way. Absence of evidence is not evidence of non-obviousness, but it removes a presumption in the patentee's favor.
• The atmospheric-health species (§ 4, Combination 3) is the strongest non-obviousness pocket on the cited art alone.

7. Bottom line

• Broad-loop claims (state / new condition / threshold impact / reconfigure, as in the Summary and published claim 1): likely obvious over Larsen (US 2001/0036810) in view of a threshold-based congestion/channel-allocation reference (e.g., Andersson US 6,519,461, Feuerstein US 6,141,565, Benveniste US 6,112,092, or Reudink US 5,889,494) — the only material gap is the atmospheric-parameter species, and that gap is closeable only with an additional link-adaptation/weather reference I could not verify.
• Narrower claims (second-lobe-pool / estimated-impact / revised-threshold; or "request from a device outside the mesh"): materially stronger for the patentee; a § 103 challenge here needs art specific to networked lobe-pool migration and inter-mesh request handling, which is not plainly visible in the reconstructed citation list.
• Confidence: moderate. Two specific blockers to a firmer conclusion: (i) I could not retrieve verbatim claims of 7,725,110, and (ii) I could not verify the content and § 102 dates of each cited reference (Andersson, Feuerstein, Benveniste, Reudink, etc.) in this session.

Recommended next steps to firm this up: pull the granted claims of US 7,725,110 from USPTO PatentCenter/Google Patents PDF; verify the filing/priority dates of US 6,751,193, 6,778,500, 6,785,511, 6,829,491, 6,990,313, and 7,508,801 for § 102(e) status; and obtain the full texts/abstracts of US 6,519,461, 6,141,565, 6,112,092, 5,889,494, and 2002/0086682 to confirm the "state + threshold + reallocate" disclosures claimed above.