Obviousness

Obviousness Analysis of U.S. Patent 9,667,337 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Date of Analysis: May 13, 2026

This analysis examines the obviousness of the independent claims of U.S. Patent 9,667,337 ('337 patent) in light of prior art available before the patent's earliest priority date of August 22, 2003. The analysis concludes that the claims would have been obvious to a Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA).

The single independent claim, Claim 1, recites a method for a wireless relay that involves:

1. Receiving data associated with an application.
2. Determining the type of application from the data.
3. Establishing a priority for retransmitting the data based on the application type and preset instructions.
4. Retransmitting the data based on that established priority.

The core of the invention is an intelligent wireless relay that performs application-aware Quality of Service (QoS) filtering to prioritize traffic. This functionality would have been an obvious development to a POSITA by combining known elements from prior art for predictable results.

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Proposed Combination of Prior Art

A combination of the following references renders the claims of the '337 patent obvious:

• SMC Networks SMC2671W 2.4 GHz 11 Mbps Wireless Ethernet Adapter (introduced June 6, 2003) (hereafter, "SMC").
• The well-known principles of Quality of Service (QoS) in network engineering as of 2003 (hereafter, "QoS Principles").

Teachings of the Prior Art

1. SMC Networks SMC2671W Adapter: As described in the '337 patent's own "Background Description" section, the SMC device was a commercially available product before the patent's priority date. It provided "wireless repeater capabilities for WLAN range extension." Crucially, the SMC device was not a simple signal booster; it possessed intelligence. It performed filtering based on MAC addresses and could be configured via a "web browser or Window-based administration software."

   • What SMC teaches: SMC explicitly teaches a wireless relay (limitation 1) that receives and retransmits data (limitation 4, in part). Most importantly, it teaches a relay with on-board processing and a user interface for accepting preset instructions to control its behavior (e.g., MAC address filtering rules). This establishes the concept of a configurable, intelligent network relay.

2. Quality of Service (QoS) Principles: By 2003, QoS was a fundamental and widely implemented concept in the field of computer networking. It was well understood that different data applications have different performance requirements. For example, Voice over IP (VoIP) and streaming video are sensitive to delay and jitter, whereas email and file transfers are not. To manage this, network devices like routers and switches were routinely designed to:

   • Inspect packet headers at Layers 3 (IP address) and 4 (TCP/UDP port numbers) to determine the application type associated with the data.
   • Use this determination to classify and prioritize packets, placing delay-sensitive traffic into higher-priority transmission queues.
   • Allow network administrators to configure these prioritization rules.

Motivation to Combine

A person of ordinary skill in the art of network engineering in 2003, faced with the increasing use of wireless networks for diverse applications like VoIP and media streaming, would have been motivated to combine the teachings of SMC and QoS Principles to improve network performance. The motivation is straightforward and compelling: to solve a known problem (traffic contention and poor performance for delay-sensitive applications) using a known solution (QoS) in a new, but analogous, context.

The SMC repeater represents a known point of traffic aggregation in a wireless network. As such, it is a natural and logical location for a bottleneck to occur. A POSITA would recognize that applying traffic prioritization at this bottleneck would improve the overall user experience. The SMC device already provided the necessary hardware platform: a processor, memory, and a user interface for configuration ("preset instructions"). The only necessary step would be to enhance its existing filtering logic. Instead of only filtering by Layer 2 MAC addresses, it would be an obvious extension to add the well-known capability of filtering and prioritizing based on Layer 3 and 4 information (IP addresses and port numbers) to identify application types.

This is not a combination born of hindsight, but a predictable implementation of a standard engineering solution (QoS) onto an existing, suitable platform (the SMC intelligent repeater) to achieve a predictable result (improved network performance for mixed-media traffic).

Mapping of Combined Art to Claim 1

• "A method for a wireless relay...": Taught directly by SMC, which is a wireless relay.
• "...receiving, at the wireless relay, a first data associated with an application;": Taught directly by SMC. As a relay, its fundamental function is to receive all data packets on its network segment.
• "...determining, at the wireless relay, a type of the application based on the first data;": This is taught by the combination. SMC provides the intelligent device capable of processing data. QoS Principles teach the specific and well-known method of inspecting packet headers (e.g., TCP/UDP port numbers) within the data to determine the application type. A POSITA would have found it obvious to implement this known QoS technique on the SMC hardware.
• "...establishing, at the wireless relay, a priority for retransmitting the first data based on the determined type of the application and based on one or more preset instructions;": This is taught by the combination. The "preset instructions" would be the QoS rules (e.g., "prioritize video traffic") entered by a user via SMC's existing web-based configuration interface. The relay would establish the priority for each packet by applying these preset rules to the application type it determined, a standard function of any QoS system.
• "...retransmitting, from the wireless relay, the first data based on the established priority.": This is the direct and intended result of the combination. After prioritizing packets according to the QoS rules, the relay's firmware would naturally retransmit them in order of that priority, for example by using separate output queues for high- and low-priority traffic.

Conclusion:

All limitations of independent Claim 1 are taught by the combination of the SMC wireless repeater and the well-established networking principles of Quality of Service. A person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine these teachings to achieve the predictable result of improved performance in a wireless network carrying diverse application traffic. Therefore, Claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,667,337 is rendered obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103.