Invalidity dossier
US 6449647
Content-aware switching of network packets
Current assignee: Cisco Technology Inc
Added 9/23/2026, 9:17:05 PM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
US 6,449,647 B1 — Content-Aware Switching of Network Packets
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6449647/en
Title: Content-aware switching of network packets
Assignee: Cisco Technology, Inc. (current); Cisco Systems, Inc. (original). An April 5, 2001 reassignment names Arrowpoint Communications (a Delaware corporation) as assignor, and a January 16, 2003 reassignment lists Cisco Systems, Inc. as assignor to Cisco Technology, Inc.
Application: US 09/400,635, filed September 21, 1999.
Dates: Priority date 1997-08-01; publication date 2002-09-10; anticipated expiration 2018-03-30. Legal status: Expired – Lifetime. A later application, US 10/197,339, claims priority (2002-07-17), as does US 11/056,031 (2005-02-11).
Inventors: Steven Colby, John J. Krawczyk, Rai Krishnan Nair, Katherine Royce, Kenneth P. Siegel, Richard C. Stevens, Scott Wasson.
Purpose and plain-language scope (per supplied excerpt): The patent concerns content-aware switching of network packets—deciding how to route or switch traffic based on the content of a request, not merely packet addressing. Its prior-art keywords are "server," "client," "content," "candidate," and "servers," indicating a server-selection context. Its classifications confirm this: H04L67/1004 (server selection for load balancing), H04L67/1014 (load balancing based on the content of a request), H04L49/355 (application-aware switches, e.g., HTTP), H04L67/1027 (session persistence during load balancing), and related resource-admission and quality-of-service classes. Together these indicate a switch/load balancer that inspects request content to choose among candidate servers, optionally considering server resources, network conditions, client/server location, and session persistence.
What the excerpt does not establish: It provides no claims, abstract, detailed description, or drawings, so the precise claimed scope cannot be stated. It does not establish inventorship priority beyond the listed 1997-08-01 priority date, the specific content examined, the selection algorithm, or any embodiment details. No litigation, ownership dispute, validity, or prior-art analysis is included; none is asserted here.
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:34:25 PM
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Litigation summary
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PTAB challenges
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Assignment history
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Prior art
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Obviousness
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Extensions
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Derivative works
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