US 7860088

I'll verify the patent details and check for any 2026 litigation activity.

US 7860088 B2 — Patent Summary

Verification note: My searches returned the Google Patents record for US7860088B2 (the authoritative full text supplied to me), the Unified Patents portal entry for the same grant, and Justia's record for the pre-grant publication US20070127520A1. I found no CAFC 2026 docket entries, district-court complaints, or PTAB proceedings naming patent 7860088. I cannot authoritatively confirm that no such 2026 activity exists — only that my searches did not surface any. Treat any litigation-status statement as unverified.

Bibliographic Data

Abstract (verbatim)

Using split interfaces for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), and bridging the IPv4 interface, makes it possible to support a Tethered Device (TD) and an Access Terminal (AT) having concurrent IP connectivity. This configuration enables the support of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) applications in the AT using IPv6 while concurrently supporting general Internet usage on a TD. It is also possible to bridge an IPv6 interface to the TD.

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims

Claim 1 — Access Terminal (apparatus). A wireless Access Terminal that lets the phone and a tethered device (e.g., a laptop) use IP at the same time, even on different IP versions. It has:

• an air interface that receives incoming packets of two different IP versions, and itself sorts each packet by version, sending it to the matching interface;
• an IP stack on the AT;
• a first IP-version interface in non-bridged mode — it passes that version's packets up to the AT's own IP stack (so the phone's own apps, e.g. IMS/VoIP, use them);
• a second IP-version interface, split from the first, in bridged mode to the tethered device — it forwards that version's packets straight out to the TD.

The key limitation is that the two interfaces work concurrently: one feeds the AT stack while the other feeds the TD at the same time. The determination of packet version happens at the air interface, not downstream.

In short: give the phone one IP version (say IPv6 for always-on IMS) and hand the other (IPv4) to the laptop, running both simultaneously.

Claim 9 — Method. The same concept expressed as method steps: receiving mixed-version packets at the air interface; the air interface determining each packet's version and forwarding to the corresponding first or second IP-version interface; first interface non-bridged to the IP stack; second interface split from the first, bridged to the tethered device; both forwarding concurrently.

Claim 17 — Apparatus (means-plus-function). The same subject matter claimed functionally, using "means for receiving" and "means for determining ... and to forward," with the identical structural limitations of non-bridged first interface, split bridged second interface, and concurrent forwarding.

Dependent Claims (worth noting)

• Claims 2–5 cover the specific version assignments in both directions: IPv6 on the AT / IPv4 on the TD (2, 3) and the reverse, IPv4 on the AT / IPv6 on the TD (4, 5).
• Claim 6 requires at least one interface to be an abstraction layer between the air interface and the IP stack (the specification's "Network Interface" concept, sitting above RLP/PPP and below TCP/IP).
• Claim 7 is the notable fallback/dual-use claim: the first (non-bridged) interface can determine that a first-version packet is actually destined for the TD and route it to the TD through the IP layer of the stack. This is how IPv6 apps on the TD can coexist with IPv6 on the AT.
• Claim 8 requires the second interface to forward packets directly to the TD without processing by the IP stack — i.e., true bridging, bypassing routing.

Technical Context (from the specification)

The problem framed in the background: launching IMS/VoIP requires an "always-on" IP connection for the AT, which in CDMA2000 conventionally meant the AT was already in a data session and therefore could not also serve a tethered device. The asserted solution is to (a) keep separate IPv4 and IPv6 network interfaces, since each protocol needs independent but duplicated state (interface state, IP addresses, etc.), and (b) put the IPv4 interface into bridging mode so it blindly forwards all IPv4 traffic to the TD, while leaving IPv6 non-bridged so IMS payloads reach the AT's stack and applications (references 26, 28, 30 in FIG. 1).

Prior Art of Record (5 references cited)

• US 6708219 B1 — 3Com Corp., "Method and system for dual-network address utilization" (1999-10-26)
• WO 2003017705 A1 — Ixi Mobile, Inc., networking services on a mobile device (2001-08-17)
• US 20040057441 A1 — Qing Li, "System and method for separating logical networks on a dual protocol stack" (2002-09-20)
• US 20040111494 A1 — [Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.), network location signature for multicast disambiguation in dual-IP-stack environments (2002-12-06)
• US 20080304501 A1 — Samsung, "Tunneling service method and system" (priority 2004-02-05)

Non-patent literature cited includes IETF draft draft-ietf-v6ops-bb-deployment-scenarios-04, Cocquet, "IPv6 on DSL: The Best Way to Develop Always-on Services" (Proc. IEEE, Aug. 2004), and Touch et al., "TetherNet Anti-NAT."

Family / Related Filings

The WO publication (WO2007120310A2, filed PCT/US2006/061532) produced national/regional members in EP (EP1955523B1), JP (JP4861429B2), KR (KR101131403B1, plus the earlier KR20080084999A), CN (CN101322378B), CA (CA2628804A1), RU (RU2008126722A), BR (BRPI0619177A2), ES (ES2381752T3), and AT (ATE551815T1). Several members show lapsed/abandoned status (CA abandoned, RU discontinued, BR ceased, KR/JP expired-fee-related, EP not-in-force), while the US patent itself remained active as of the record.

Uncertainty Flags

• Inventor name order: the patent lists "Marcello Lioy"; Unified Patents renders it "Lioy Marcello." Same person; I am reporting the patent's format.
• Current assignee: Google Patents lists "Qualcomm Inc"; Unified Patents shows "Qualcomm Inc" as original assignee with a "Parent Company: Qualcomm." I have not independently verified whether any later reassignment occurred.
• Litigation (CAFC 2026 or otherwise): Not verified. No case names, docket numbers, or findings should be attributed to this patent on the basis of my searches.
• Expiration (2028-06-06): this is the adjusted-expiration field as listed; it is a database assertion, not a legal conclusion, and I have not recalculated term adjustment from primary documents.

I'll search litigation databases for US patent 7860088.

Let me search more specifically for this patent's litigation history.

Let me try the litigation database directly and a few more targeted queries.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 7,860,088

Patent: U.S. 7,860,088 B2 — "Concurrent internet protocol connectivity to an access terminal and a tethered device"
Assignee: Qualcomm Incorporated | Inventor: Marcello Lioy
Priority date: 2005-12-01 | Filed: 2006-03-31 | Granted: 2010-12-28
Status: Active; adjusted expiration 2028-06-06

Bottom line

No litigation was located that specifically asserts or involves U.S. Patent No. 7,860,088. The searches did not surface any district court complaint, CAFC appeal, ITC action, or PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM) naming this patent. On the record available to me, the patent appears to be litigation-free.

Sources checked

• Unified Patents litigation/patent portal — dedicated record page for US-7860088-B2 (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7860088-B2) exists and shows bibliographic/family data, but no associated litigation entries.
• PACER/RECAP via CourtListener and docket aggregators (Justia, UniCourt, Docket Alarm).
• General web/news searches for the patent number in litigation contexts.
• Google Patents "Cited By" listing: the citing documents are later patents (predominantly the Headwater Research / Headwater Partners device-assisted-services family, all priority 2009-01-28). These are citations, not litigation.

Important caveats on matches (no auto-correction applied)

Because you asked me to interpret identifiers literally, I want to flag the near-number "hits" my searches returned and confirm none of them is your patent:

None of these should be attributed to U.S. 7,860,088.

Confidence and limitations

• I have high confidence that the patent is a Qualcomm asset with no widely reported assertion campaign — Qualcomm is an operating company, and this patent does not appear in the asserted-patent lists of the Qualcomm litigations I encountered (e.g., Apple v. Qualcomm, S.D. Cal. 3:17-cv-00108; Network System Technologies v. Qualcomm, W.D. Tex. 1:22-cv-1331; Qualcomm v. ARM, D. Del. 1:24-cv-00490 — all involve different patents).
• Lower confidence on completeness: a truly exhaustive negative requires a docket-by-docket query (e.g., full PACER "Patent/Trademark Report" (AO-120) index, Lex Machina, Darts-IP, or a paid litigation database keyed to the exact number). My searches were web-based and may not capture every sealed, settled, or recently filed action.
• If an IPR/PGR exists, it would appear in the USPTO PTAB "Patent Trial" tab for the patent; I did not retrieve a PTAB proceeding tied to 7,860,088.

Recommendation

To convert this from "not found" to a verified negative, I suggest running the exact string "7,860,088" (and application 11/394,782) against:

1. Lex Machina / Darts-IP / RPX Insight (patent-level litigation search),
2. The USPTO Patent Center "Litigation" and PTAB APIs for this patent, and
3. The AO-120 reports in PACER dockets.

If you'd like, I can attempt targeted follow-up searches on any of those specific databases or on the co-pending international counterparts (EP 1955523, JP 4861429, CN 101322378, KR 101131403) to see whether any foreign counterpart was asserted.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" block against live sources before writing.

Let me run a few more targeted checks to make sure the ODP "none" result isn't just an indexing gap.

One more check focused on the PTAB E2E / developer API surface and any non-indexed filing.

PTAB Proceedings — US 7860088 B2

Method note first, because it changes the answer: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied in this prompt is the canonical USPTO Open Data Portal list, and it is empty — no AIA trial proceedings are indexed for this patent. I independently searched for any proceeding the ODP might not have ingested (petitioner names, the application number 11/394,782, the provisional 60/742,155, the claim vocabulary, and the Unified Patents litigation portal) and surfaced nothing naming 7860088. Everything the searches returned was either the patent's own bibliographic record or unrelated Qualcomm IPRs (Apple v. Qualcomm on the '936 patent; Intel v. Qualcomm on the power-tracker patents, IPR2018-01281/-01282; Qualcomm Inc. v. Intel Corp., Nos. 2020-1589 et al.). None of those involve this patent. I am therefore reporting a genuine zero, not an assumed zero.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings: 0. No IPRs, no PGRs, and no CBM reviews have ever been filed against US 7860088 B2 — status breakdown is inapplicable (no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained in a trial, no settlements, no institution denials). The defensive posture this gives a defendant is "untested and un-narrowed": all 17 claims (independents 1, 9, and 17, plus dependents 2–8 and 10–16) still carry their original scope and the § 282 presumption, and no petitioner has ever given you a free, fully-litigated invalidity roadmap. Critically, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone — that also means you are the first mover, with no prior FWD salvaging or sinking any claim for you. One important framing caveat: the prompt's stock example ("claims 1-5 have been canceled — the troll has no case") does not fit this patent. The current assignee is Qualcomm Incorporated, not a monetization entity, and the patent has no PTAB history and no litigation history I could find. This is an unused portfolio asset, not a hardened litigation patent.

No proceedings to itemize

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} block to write, because writing one would require fabricating a proceeding number. I will not do that. What follows is instead a defendant-facing read of the absence.

• Patent Owner of record: Qualcomm Incorporated (assignment recorded 2006-07-21; assignor Marcello Lioy). No third-party reassignment surfaced.
• Remaining term: adjusted expiration listed as 2028-06-06 — approximately 20 months from today (2026-09-29). This is a database assertion, not a legal conclusion, and I have not recalculated term adjustment from primary documents.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Because there have been no AIA trials, the correct statement is that no claim of 7860088 is canceled by the PTAB and no claim has been adjudicated invalid in that forum. Claims 1, 9, and 17 (the three independents) and every dependent remain exactly as issued. The only meaningful narrowing of this patent to date is prosecution-side, not post-grant: the family shows several foreign members lapsed (CA abandoned, RU discontinued, BR ceased, several KR/JP members expired or fee-lapsed, EP not-in-force), so the US grant is effectively the last live member. That is a commercial-footprint fact, not an invalidity fact.

Estoppel landscape. There is none. § 315(e)(2) estoppel runs only against a petitioner, real party in interest, or privy that filed an IPR/PGR and obtained an FWD — and no one has. Practically, that means every prior-art ground is still available to a defendant: nothing is barred as "raised or reasonably could have been raised." There is also no § 325(e)(1)/(e)(2) PGR estoppel and no § 315(e)(1) IPR estoppel. Two consequences follow: (1) you get a clean slate for an IPR petition, and (2) you cannot offensively point to anyone else's FWD to argue issue preclusion. If you file, expect the panel to reach the merits without any prior Board reasoning to lean on — and expect Qualcomm to defend a patent that has never been stress-tested.

Pattern signals. No repeat-petitioner pattern exists (no petitioner at all). No defensive aggregator appears in the chain — Unified Patents publishes a record page for this patent but shows no challenge activity; it is a data source here, not a party. Qualcomm has not pursued PTAB appeals on this patent, for the obvious reason that no PTAB decision exists to appeal. The unrelated Federal Circuit Qualcomm cases that my searches surfaced (e.g., Qualcomm Inc. v. Intel Corp., Nos. 2020-1589 to -1594, on the carrier-aggregation power-tracker patents) are not this patent and should not be cited as "Qualcomm's IPR appeal history on the '088 patent."

Why the absence is only weakly informative here. Absence of IPRs is a stronger negative signal for a litigation-asserted patent than for a dormant portfolio patent. Third parties file IPRs when they are sued or threatened. This patent appears never to have been asserted, so the absence of IPRs is at least as consistent with "nobody had a reason to file" as with "the claims are strong." Do not over-read the silence as a quality endorsement.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant being asserted against: assume you would be the first-ever PTAB challenger. Verify the § 315(b) clock — the one-year bar runs from service of the complaint, and it is the single most common way a would-be petitioner loses its forum. There is no FWD to link to and no disposition to quote, because none exists; any brief arguing otherwise would be sanction-bait in the opposite direction.
• Build your ground set from scratch, starting with the record art. The five references cited on the face of the patent are the natural starting point, and they are notably close in subject matter: US 6,708,219 (3Com, dual-network address utilization), WO 2003/017705 (Ixi Mobile, networking services on a mobile device), US 2004/0057441 (Qing Li, separating logical networks on a dual protocol stack), US 2004/0111494 (Microsoft, dual-IP-stack multicast disambiguation), and US 2008/0304501 (Samsung, tunneling — priority 2004-02-05, which predates the 2005-12-01 priority date even though it published later). The non-patent literature of record (IETF draft-ietf-v6ops-bb-deployment-scenarios-04; Cocquet, "IPv6 on DSL," Proc. IEEE Aug. 2004; Touch et al., "TetherNet Anti-NAT") is also on the face of the patent and bears directly on dual-stack/bridging practice.
• Mind the calendar, not just the art. With an adjusted expiration of 2028-06-06, an IPR filed now would run institution (~6 months) plus trial to FWD (~12 months), putting a final decision close to or past expiry. That usually shifts the calculus toward staying in district court / using IPR as leverage rather than as a standalone kill shot, and it is a legitimate factor in whether the expense is worth it.
• Brief the claim-construction pressure points. The claim language concentrates risk in functionally-loaded terms — "split from," "bridged mode," "non-bridged mode," "directly ... without processing by the IP Stack," and the claim 1/9/17 requirement that the air interface itself determine packet version. Claims 6–8 and 14–16 (abstraction layer; routing first-version packets via the IP layer under claim 7/15; direct forwarding under claim 8/16) narrow further and are the natural non-infringement fallbacks for an accused tethering implementation.
• Verify independently before relying on this. I confirmed the zero from the structured ODP block plus targeted web searches, but I cannot prove a negative. Re-run the check in PTAB E2E / PTACTS (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/) filtered on patent 7,860,088, and also check whether any ex parte reexamination (not an AIA trial, so outside this prompt's scope) has been filed. The patent's Unified Patents record page (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7860088-B2) and the Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US7860088B2](/patent/US7860088B2)/en) showed no challenge activity as of my checks.

Plainly, as instructed: there is no PTAB activity on US 7860088. No proceeding number, panel, institution decision, FWD, settlement, or appeal exists to report. That absence is a fact about this patent's posture, not a finding that its claims are valid — and it means the first serious invalidity test of claims 1–17 has yet to happen.

I'll reconstruct the assignment chain from USPTO records and cross-reference ownership databases.

Let me verify the recorded reel/frame and check for any post-issuance assignments.

Assignment & Ownership Chain — U.S. Patent No. 7,860,088 B2

Scope note / method. assignmentcenter.uspto.gov is a JavaScript application that my web-search tool cannot drive directly, and my final targeted queries against legacy-assignments.uspto.gov (reel-level PDF and index lookups) hit the tool-call limit before returning results. What follows is built from the Google Patents "Legal Events" block in the authoritative full text, which is a direct mirror of the USPTO assignment record (it quotes the reel/frame and effective date verbatim), plus the family/WO/EP/IN bibliographic records and the Unified Patents portal entry. I did not retrieve the correspondent-of-record field — I flag that gap explicitly in the signal analysis rather than guess at a name. Everything below is verifiable at the USPTO Assignment Center by patent number 7860088 or application 11/394,782.

Inventors

Discrepancy to flag against the earlier sections. The previously generated summary listed "Inventor: Marcello Lioy" as a single entry, consistent with the US grant and pre-grant publication US 2007/0127520 A1, both of which name only Lioy. However, the PCT publication WO 2007/120310 A2, EP 1955523 B1, and the Indian national-phase record all name two inventors — LIOY, Marcello and DYCK, Jeffrey. The USPTO assignment record likewise shows an assignment executed by Lioy alone. This is the classic US-vs-PCT divergence: the US application as filed (2006-03-31) and the provisional (60/742,155, 2005-12-01) apparently named one inventor, while the later-filed PCT (2006-12-01) named two. It is not evidence of an inventor "departing within 12 months" or a fire-sale precursor — Lioy remained a Qualcomm inventor into the 2010s. I am flagging the count difference, not inferring misjoinder; resolving which filing is correct requires the executed declarations, which are not in the supplied record.

Original assignee

QUALCOMM Incorporated — a Delaware corporation, place of business 5775 Morehouse Drive, San Diego, California 92121-1714, U.S.A. (this is the exact recital used in Qualcomm's assignment instruments on record).

• Was the entity the issued patent's assignee? Yes. The assignment was executed 2006-06-20 and recorded 2006-07-21 — i.e., before the non-provisional was even a year old and more than four years before grant.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Qualcomm is an operating semiconductor/telecom company whose MSM/modem chipsets and CDMA2000 (and later multi-mode) baseband platforms implement exactly the AT-side stack described here — dual IPv4/IPv6 network interfaces, tethered/LAP-mode data sharing over the air interface. The specification's own framing (CDMA2000 RLP/PPP under the IP stack, IMS over IPv6) is Qualcomm's own product context. So yes: an operating-company patent, practiced in the assignee's own commercial line.
• Primary line of business: wireless telecommunications — chipset design/licensing (QCT) and patent licensing (QTL); publicly traded (NASDAQ: QCOM).
• Current status: operating; not acquired, not dissolved, not in bankruptcy. Qualcomm has never filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11. The Google Patents legal-status line for this grant is "Active," and Unified Patents lists the Parent Company as Qualcomm with the current assignee as Qualcomm.

Assignment timeline

One recorded assignment exists for this patent. Chronological list:

• 2006-06-20 (executed) / recorded 2006-07-21 — Reel 017980 / Frame 0572
  • Conveyance: Assignment (USPTO event code AS; Google Patents free-text: "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNMENT OF INTEREST; ASSIGNOR: LIOY, MARCELLO")
  • Assignor: Marcello Lioy, an individual (San Diego, CA)
  • Assignee: QUALCOMM Incorporated, a Delaware corporation, 5775 Morehouse Drive, San Diego, California 92121-1714
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. The assignment instrument quoted in the record identifies the assignee's place of business but the correspondent-of-record field (the attorney/agent who filed the recording) was not surfaced by my queries. I am not going to name a firm here without the record in hand. (Qualcomm recordings of this era were routinely filed through Qualcomm's own IP administration; that is a general practice observation, not a citation to this reel.)
  • Context: routine employee invention assignment — the standard pre-issuance, no-consideration-beyond-employment transfer from a salaried Qualcomm engineer to his employer. Not an acquisition, not a fire-sale, not a securitization, not a transfer to an asserter.
  • Recurrence flag: cannot be assessed for the correspondent (field not retrieved). There is no recurrence to report among assignees, because there is only one link in the chain.

No other recorded assignments exist. There is no security agreement, no merger, no change-of-name, no license recordation, no release, and no correction on this patent. The only other "Legal Events" entries are administrative:

Twelve-year fee paid in 2022 as a large entity — consistent with a large operating company holding the asset directly, and inconsistent with the asset having been parked in a small-entity shell (which would have to certify small-entity status or pay large-entity fees; a small-entity shell paying large-entity fees for a single patent portfolio would be unusual but not impossible — I note it as a consistency check, not proof).

Practical upshot: because the record shows only the original 2006 assignment, the original assignee (Qualcomm) still owns the patent.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7860088
    2005 : Provisional filed Dec 1
    2006 : Non-provisional filed Mar 31
         : Assignment executed Jun 20
         : Recorded Jul 21 Reel 017980 frame 0572
    2007 : Pre-grant publication Jun 7
         : PCT publication Oct 25
    2010 : Patent granted Dec 28
    2011 : Assignment to Qualcomm confirmed
    2014 : Maintenance fee 4th year paid
    2018 : Maintenance fee 8th year paid
    2022 : Maintenance fee 12th year paid
    2028 : Adjusted expiration Jun 6

(The 2011 line reflects the EP 1955523 B1 grant/publication of the family member in that year; the US chain has no 2011 event. Remove it if you want US-only events.)

NPE / troll-pattern signals

The threshold fact dominates this analysis: there is exactly one recorded assignment, it is the original inventor-to-employer assignment, and it runs to a large operating company that has held the patent for its entire life (20 years by adjusted expiration). Against that backdrop:

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. No transfer of any kind after Reel 017980/0572 (recorded 2006-07-21). No "IP / Holdings / Ventures / Licensing" assignee ever appears. The current assignee is Qualcomm Incorporated by 5775 Morehouse Drive, not a registered-agent service address.
2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. No assignee at any point matches Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or any Spangenberg entity. Qualcomm appears on those lists as a defendant/target, not as a transferor to them, for this patent.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Unclear / not assessable. The chain has a single link, so "recurrence within the chain" is structurally impossible to detect here. More importantly, I could not retrieve the correspondent-of-record for Reel 017980/0572, so I cannot test the field at all. I decline to infer a name. This is the one signal I would want re-run against Assignment Center directly.
4. Cascading transfers — Not present. Zero consecutive transfers, let alone chained LLCs within 24 months.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. No infringement suit naming this patent was located (per the earlier litigation section: no district-court complaint, CAFC appeal, ITC action, or PTAB proceeding found). With no suit and no post-2006 assignment, there is no pre-suit transfer to time.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. Qualcomm has not filed Chapter 7/11; there is no bankruptcy sale, 363 sale, or credit-bid transfer in the record. The 12th-year fee was paid personally by the large-entity owner in 2022 (Reel-level event 2022-05-11), which is affirmatively inconsistent with a distressed liquidation.
7. Privateering — Not present (as to this patent). No evidence Qualcomm transferred this grant to an assertion vehicle to sue competitors with it; the patent sits inside Qualcomm's own portfolio and its family members (EP, JP, CN, KR, CA, RU, BR, ES, AT) are likewise held by Qualcomm and mostly lapsed on fee non-payment rather than being pushed to a litigating entity.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain terminates at Qualcomm, not at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The patent has not been neutralized by defensive aggregation; it simply was never asserted.

Verdict

Insufficient data — with the caveat that the reason is benign, not suspicious. The Assignment Center record for US 7,860,088 contains only the original assignment (Lioy → QUALCOMM Incorporated, executed 2006-06-20, recorded 2006-07-21, Reel 017980/Frame 0572); there are no post-issuance transfers, no LLC assignees, no security interests, and no asserter in the chain. Under the task's own taxonomy, "only the original assignment" maps to Insufficient data rather than to Operating-company assertion (which would additionally require the current assignee to be suing actual competitors on this patent — no such suit was located in the earlier litigation pass, and no suit was located in this ownership pass either).

Justification. (1) One recorded conveyance, Reel 017980/0572, effective 2006-06-20, assignor Lioy to the Delaware operating company Qualcomm — an ordinary employment assignment, not a transfer-to-asserter. (2) Maintenance fees at 4, 8, and 12 years (2014-05-28, 2018-05-09, 2022-05-11) were all paid by the large-entity owner of record, and the asset has been held continuously for ~20 years by the same party. (3) No shell entity, no known NPE assignee, no cascading transfers, no bankruptcy, no defensive-aggregator terminus, and no litigation was found. The two items I could not close are the correspondent of record for Reel 017980/0572 (field not retrieved — unresolved) and the US-vs-PCT inventor-count divergence (Lioy alone on the US papers; Lioy + Dyck on WO/EP/IN). Neither is an NPE signal.

Verification link: search by patent number 7860088 or application 11/394,782 at the USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (mirror/index: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). The record to confirm is Reel 017980 / Frame 0572.

To upgrade this from "one link in the chain" to a verified negative, query the exact strings "7,860,088" and "11/394,782" in Assignment Center and pull the correspondent/attorney-of-record field for Reel 017980/0572; then cross-check the same correspondent against Qualcomm's other ~2006-era recordings (the legacy-assignments PDF assignment-pat-029077-0877.pdf is an example of Qualcomm's bulk-recording format) to test signal #3 properly.

I'll start by verifying the USPTO record for the exact patent number and gathering details on each cited reference.

Let me retrieve details on the remaining two patent citations and the non-patent literature.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 7,860,088 B2

Verification of the target patent (exact number, no auto-correction). The USPTO/Google Patents record for US 7,860,088 B2 corresponds exactly to the patent supplied: "Concurrent internet protocol connectivity to an access terminal and a tethered device," Application No. 11/394,782, filed 2006-03-31, granted 2010-12-28, inventor Marcello Lioy, assignee Qualcomm Incorporated (assignment recorded 2006-07-21, Reel/Frame 017980/0572), claiming priority to provisional 60/742,155 (filed 2005-12-01). I did not substitute any similar number. Note for the record: Unified Patents renders the priority date as 2005-11-30 in some citing entries and the inventor order as "Lioy Marcello"; the patent itself states 2005-12-01 and "Marcello Lioy." These are formatting/rounding discrepancies in third-party databases, not different patents.

Prior-art date framing. The application's own record gives a prior-art reference date of 2005-12-01 (provisional) / 2006-03-31 (filing). Under pre‑AIA practice that was in force in 2006, a reference must predate the invention or have an earlier effective U.S. filing date to qualify. I flag where a citation's own dates strain that requirement.

Important analytical caveat (read before the claim mapping)

The instruction asks which claims each reference "potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102." I want to be explicit rather than overstate: none of the five patent citations of record is a clean, single-reference § 102 anticipation of independent claims 1, 9, or 17. Every independent claim requires, in combination:

1. an air interface that itself determines packet IP version and routes accordingly;
2. two IP-version interfaces split from each other;
3. one interface non-bridged feeding the AT's own IP stack, the other bridged to a tethered device; and
4. concurrent forwarding to the AT stack and the tethered device.

The cited references disclose pieces of this (dual-stack separation, mobile-device tethering, bridging), which is why the examiner cited them — as § 103 obviousness showings and as background, not as anticipatory art. I identify below, per reference, the claims each is most relevant to, and say plainly where anticipation fails. I do not convert § 103 relevance into § 102 anticipation.

1. US 6,708,219 B1 — 3Com Corporation

Description. A dual-IP-stack (IPv4/IPv6) networking scheme in which a first network device on a local IPv6 network communicates with a second device on a remote network across an intervening IPv4 network, using a dual IP stack that selects the appropriate stack portion, adds the corresponding IP header, and employs virtual tunnel gateways to carry traffic across the version boundary. It is essentially a tunneling/address-utilization mechanism for IPv4–IPv6 coexistence, not a tethering architecture.

Relevance to 7,860,088's claims. This is the reference most likely to be mapped against the dual-stack separation idea and claim 6's "abstraction layer" language and the general presence of "first Internet Protocol version packets and … second Internet Protocol version packets" (claims 1, 9, 17 preambles). It teaches a dual stack that "determin[es] … whether the data packet will use a … version-6 address."

§ 102 assessment. No anticipation. It does not disclose an Access Terminal, a tethered device, an air interface performing version determination, bridged vs. non-bridged interfaces, or concurrent AT/TD forwarding. Best characterized as § 103 background, and only relevant to the dual-version-packet element (claims 1/9/17) and, weakly, claim 6.

2. WO 2003/017705 A1 — Ixi Mobile, Inc.

Description. A mobile device (e.g., cellular telephone with a Bluetooth processor/transceiver) running a "microrouter" with Bluetooth LAN Access Profile, routing, PPP-server, and NAT components, plus hooks for VPN/firewall/LAN services, so the phone can act as a gateway providing network services to nearby/attached devices and be monitored/reconfigured by a telecommunications operator. This is a tethering/microrouter disclosure.

Relevance. Maps loosely to the general concept of a mobile device extending network service to a companion device (cf. the Access Terminal / Tethered Device relationship in claims 1, 9, 17). The PPP role here is the same protocol family the 7,860,088 specification names as sitting below its Network Interface abstraction (claim 6).

§ 102 assessment. No anticipation. No teaching of IP-version-based sorting at an air interface, no split bridged/non-bridged interfaces, no concurrent AT-stack-plus-TD forwarding. § 103/background relevance only. (Note: this WO reference appears in the Google Patents "Citations" list without the "cited by examiner" asterisk that the other four patent citations carry — i.e., its exact citation origin is worth confirming against the face of the patent.)

3. US 2004/0057441 A1 — Qing Li

Description. An operating system with a first component including a first protocol stack and a second component including a second protocol stack, each initialized independently of the other, plus a third component (data-link-layer / MUX) that receives packets of the first and second types and directs them to the respective component. It expressly addresses the duplicated state problem (separate IPv4 and IPv6 components each with their own addresses/state and a separate MIB variable), and provides a "MUX" between the L2 component and the L3 components.

Relevance — the structurally closest reference. This is the citation that most closely tracks two recitations of the independent claims:

• the "split" interfaces of claims 1/9/17 (two independently-initialized IP-version components);
• the claim 6 abstraction-layer requirement (a MUX/L2 component between the link layer and the L3 stacks); and
• the "direct the data packets of the first type to the first component and the data packets of the second type to the second component" function that parallels the version-determination-and-forward element of claims 1/9/17.

§ 102 assessment. No anticipation. The sorting is performed at a data-link-layer/MUX component inside the operating system, not at an air interface, and there is no bridged interface to a tethered device, no concurrent AT/TD forwarding, and no tethered device at all. It is nonetheless the strongest § 103 combination reference for the split-interface and abstraction-layer features (claims 1, 6, 9, 17).

4. US 2004/0111494 A1 — Microsoft Corporation

Description. A dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) and/or multi-homed device inserts a "network location signature" field into UPnP multicast announcements so that a control point can distinguish an additional valid address from a genuine address change. The discussion is largely about UPnP discovery, caching, and multi-homed address sets.

Relevance. Background only: it confirms that dual-IP-stack devices and multiple protocol stacks/network interfaces were known before the 2005 priority date (supporting the premise that "separate network interfaces for IPv4 and IPv6" is old environment). This can support a § 103 motivation-to-combine argument, but it discloses no AT/TD, no air interface, no bridging.

§ 102 assessment. No anticipation of any claim of 7,860,088. Purely § 103/background.

5. US 2008/0304501 A1 — Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Description. A tunneling service method/system that establishes a tunnel so a mobile node can be reached/route traffic via a tunnel (family listing ties to mobility/tunneling art).

Relevance and timing caution. The publication date (2008-12-11) is after even the 2006-03-31 filing, so it cannot be prior art as a printed publication under the § 102(a)/(b)-type categories measured against a 2005-12-01 reference date. It could only qualify under a § 102(e)-type provision (U.S. application/patent with an earlier effective U.S. filing date) if its actual U.S. filing date predates the critical date — its 2004-02-05 priority date is consistent with that, but I could not confirm the exact U.S. filing date from the sources retrieved. Treat its prior-art status as unverified pending the filing-date check.

§ 102 assessment. Even assuming § 102(e) eligibility, the reference is about tunneling, not air-interface packet-version sorting, split bridged/non-bridged interfaces, or concurrent AT/TD delivery — so it does not anticipate claims 1, 9, or 17.

Non-Patent Literature of record (5)

These are cited for context/support; none is an anticipatory single reference, but two are the most on-point for the problem the patent solves:

Bottom line

• Most relevant prior art, ranked: (1) US 2004/0057441 A1 (Qing Li) — closest to the "split interfaces" / abstraction-layer / packet-directing recitations (claims 1, 6, 9, 17); (2) US 6,708,219 B1 (3Com) — dual-stack/dual-version packet handling; (3) WO 2003/017705 A1 (Ixi Mobile) and the Touch "TetherNet" paper — mobile-device tethering/address-sharing; (4) US 2004/0111494 A1 (Microsoft) and the remaining NPL — background.
• No clean § 102 anticipation of independent claims 1, 9, or 17 is established by any single one of the five patent citations of record. Their force is as § 103 references and background. The distinguishing limitations the record does not appear to disclose in combination are the air interface itself performing the IP-version determination and the concurrent, split bridged/non-bridged forwarding to AT stack and tethered device.
• Two items to verify before relying on this analysis: (a) the exact U.S. filing date of US 2008/0304501 (needed to decide § 102(e) eligibility), and (b) whether WO 2003/017705 was examiner-cited or applicant-cited, and the one-day priority discrepancy (2001-08-16 vs. 2001-08-17) between databases.
• Claims 2–5 are only version-assignment permutations (IPv6↔AT / IPv4↔TD and the reverse) and inherit the same analysis; claim 6 maps most closely to Qing Li and the Eggert bridging discussion; claims 7–8 (routing via the IP layer vs. direct bridging without stack processing) are not squarely met by any of the five citations.

If you want, I can pull the face-of-patent (front page) citation list to confirm which references the examiner actually cited versus which are third-party, and retrieve the exact US filing date for US 2008/0304501.

I'll ground this analysis by pulling accurate bibliographic and technical details for the five references of record before constructing the § 103 combinations.

Now let me pull the remaining references of record.

Let me pull the two most tethering-relevant non-patent references.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 7,860,088 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Builds on: the bibliographic table, verbatim abstract, and claim-by-claim summary already generated above. Those are treated as authoritative here; I do not repeat them except where a claim element must be mapped.

Evidentiary caveat up front. I reached my tool-call limit before retrieving the full text of two of the three non-patent references of record (Touch et al., TetherNet Anti-NAT; Cocquet, "IPv6 on DSL"). Those two are cited below only at the level of the titles/summaries listed in the Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US7860088](/patent/US7860088)/en), not from their full text. Everything I attribute to the five patent references of record is drawn from full-text/abstract retrievals cited by URL below. This is a retrospective, hypothetical § 103 analysis — not a validity opinion.

1. Legal framework and governing date

• The application was filed 2006-03-31 with a provisional priority of 2005-12-01, so pre-AIA § 103(a) governs. The critical date for prior-art qualification is the 2005-12-01 priority date (or, at the latest, the 2006-03-31 filing date).
• Standard: Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966); KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). Under KSR, a claim is obvious where the differences over the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious to a POSITA, and where the combination is "of familiar elements according to known methods" yielding "predictable results." MPEP §§ 2143–2144 supply the enumerated rationales (combining known elements, simple substitution, design incentives, "obvious to try," teachings in the references).
• Because claim 1 is an apparatus claim (AT + air interface + two IP-version interfaces + IP stack), claims 9/17 are the method/means-plus-function counterparts, and claims 2–8 are narrowing, the same combination disposes of the whole claim set; I address the dependents separately in § 6.

2. Reference qualification (all pulled from the record; no number auto-correction)

Timing flag on the Samsung reference. US 2008/0304501 A1 published 2008-12-11 — after the '088 filing date — so it is not a § 102(a) or § 102(b) printed publication as to this patent. It could only qualify under § 102(e) if the underlying U.S. application was filed before the critical date; its 2004-02-05 priority is a Korean priority date, and the family's earlier U.S. publication appears to be US 2005/0175020 A1 (pub. 2005-08-11). I did not verify the U.S. filing date from primary documents, so I treat the Samsung reference as supporting, not load-bearing, in the theories below. (Note also that Ixi/U.S. 2005/0175020 and the other references are cleanly prior art, so the analysis does not depend on the Samsung timing question.)

3. Claim 1 element-mapping for the primary combination

Primary combination (designated "C1"): WO 2003/017705 (Ixi) + US 2004/0057441 (Li) + US 6,708,219 (3Com).

Note on the "air interface determines" language: Li locates the directing function at a data-link/MUX layer and 3Com at the dual stack; the '088 air interface is itself described in the patent's own specification as the point where packets "arriving over an air interface… are received by an AT and are… forwarded" based on IP version. Put differently, the claimed "determination at the air interface" is a relocation of a known classification step to the packet ingress point — precisely the kind of "simple substitution of one known element for another" and "predictable use of prior-art elements according to their established functions" that KSR and MPEP § 2144 condemn.

4. Motivation to combine (the KSR / MPEP rationales)

A POSITA at 2005 would have combined these references for several independent, well-documented reasons:

1. The problem itself is framed in the record. The '088 background states that IMS/VoIP requires the AT to be "always-on," which under CDMA2000 "implies that it is not possible to support a TD as the AT is already in a data session." Ixi addresses the same architecture — a handheld cellular device acting as a router/bridge so that "LAN devices… may access the WAN" — and thus supplies both the tethered-device element and the motivation to serve one.

2. The references supply the very deficiency the '088 patent claims to fix. Li's background expressly identifies the problem '088 solves: on a single dual-stack interface, "the operation of one logical network implies the concurrent operation of the other logical network," harming embedded-device memory/performance (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20040057441A1/en). Li's solution — independent IPv4 and IPv6 components with a directing (MUX) layer — is the claimed "split." A POSITA seeking to decouple the AT's IPv6 IMS traffic from the TD's IPv4 traffic would be led directly to Li.

3. Version-determination-then-interface-selection is a known, single-reference technique. 3Com's claim 19 literally recites "determining from the dual Internet Protocol stack whether the data packet will use [IPv6]… and if so…[,] and if not…" — i.e., classify by version, then route to the corresponding stack portion. Combining 3Com's classification with Li's split components is the predictable assembly of known elements.

4. Bridging is admitted known art. The '088 specification itself describes bridging as a conventional technique — "An example of this is a Wireless LAN bridge. Any packets arriving on the Ethernet interface must be forwarded over the WLAN interface without exception." That is an applicant admission that the "bridged mode / forward without processing by the IP stack" limitation (claim 8) is old. The FreeBSD NPL of record (Re: CFR: bridge locking, 2003) reinforces that OS-level bridging was routine. Under § 103, an admitted prior-art technique cannot supply patentable weight.

5. The claimed concurrency and the specific version allocation are design choices. The patent's own dependent claims 2–5 cover both assignments (IPv6-on-AT/IPv4-on-TD and the reverse). A limitation that reads on either polarity is, by definition, an arbitrary design choice — strong evidence of obviousness under MPEP § 2144.02.

6. The NPL of record supplies the "always-on IPv6" motivation. Cocquet, "IPv6 on DSL: The Best Way to Develop Always-on Services" (Proc. IEEE, Aug. 2004), and the IETF draft draft-ietf-v6ops-bb-deployment-scenarios-04 (Oct. 2005) — both cited on the face of the patent — teach IPv6 as the vehicle for always-on services with IPv4/IPv6 coexistence. TetherNet Anti-NAT (Touch et al., 2003) concerns tethering/subnet provision to attached devices, supplying additional motivation for the TD element. (Full texts not retrieved; see caveat.)

Taken together, the combination reflects "the mere arrangement of old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform" — the classic § 103 case.

5. Alternative combinations

C2 — 3Com primary, Ixi + Li secondary. Use US 6,708,219 as the primary reference for the dual-stack, per-packet version determination and first/second stack-portion selection; add Ixi for the AT→TD forwarding/bridging architecture and Li for making the two stack portions independent/separate interfaces. This combination arguably reaches claim 1 with the fewest reference boundaries, because 3Com alone supplies the "determine version → select corresponding portion" core.

C3 — Li primary, plus Ixi + 3Com (+ Microsoft / Samsung as corroboration). Li supplies the split/independent IPv4 and IPv6 components and the directing layer; Ixi supplies the AT-to-TD link and forwarding; 3Com supplies the dual-stack version-decision. Microsoft US 2004/0111494 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20040111494A1/en) and Samsung US 2008/0304501 corroborate that dual-stack/multi-homed nodes handling multiple addresses were well known, though for the reasons in § 2 these are corroborative only.

C4 — Li + Ixi + the § 102(b) admissions in the '088 specification itself. Even without 3Com, Li's single-reference disclosure of two independent protocol components plus the specification's own admitted background (bridging; network-interface abstraction layers between RLP/PPP and TCP/IP) supplies most of claim 1, with the balance being the ordinary routing/forwarding choices the specification itself describes as conventional.

6. Dependent claims and the other independent claims

• Claims 2–5 (version assignments): Obvious. Li expressly contemplates IPv6 or IPv4 as the first stack; 3Com treats the IPv6/IPv4 duality symmetrically; the patent's own specification concedes the assignment is a choice ("the same technique could be used to provide IPv4 to the AT and IPv6 to the TD").
• Claim 6 (abstraction layer between air interface and IP stack): Obvious over Li alone (the L2/MUX component between the data-link layer and the L3 protocol components is exactly such an abstraction layer), and the '088 specification admits "Network Interfaces… provide an abstraction layer between the physical layer… and the generic IP stack above."
• Claim 7 (first interface routes a first-version packet destined for the TD via the IP layer): Obvious over 3Com/Li + ordinary IP routing. The specification itself defines routing as "examin[ing] the IP addresses in the header and determining if the packet is destined for the local host… or another host" — an admitted conventional operation.
• Claim 8 (second interface forwards directly to the TD without IP-stack processing): Obvious — this is the definition of bridging, admitted in the specification's WLAN-bridge example.
• Claims 9 and 17 (method; means-plus-function): Rise and fall with claim 1. The "means for receiving" and "means for determining … and to forward" correspond to the air interface/dual-stack logic that 3Com and Li already disclose, and the structural limitations are identical to claim 1.

7. Anticipated counterarguments and how they fare

1. "Non-analogous art." The patentee would argue that 3Com, Li, and Microsoft are wireline/enterprise/PC networking, not CDMA2000 air-interface tethering. Weak-to-moderate. Under the field-of-endeavor test all are IP-networking references dealing with dual-stack packet handling, and Ixi is squarely in mobile-device LAN/WAN bridging. KSR also discourages rigid analogical-sporting. Still, this is the patentee's best argument, because the "gateway-determines-version-then-forwards" step is recited at the air interface specifically.
2. "No reference suggests sending one version out a different medium to a TD." Moderate. Li keeps both logical networks on one interface; it does not itself teach egress to a separate tethered device. This gap is what Ixi fills, and this is why C1/C2 rely on Ixi as a necessary member. The combination is therefore a genuine multi-reference case, not a single-reference anticipation.
3. "Bridging mode vs. non-bridged mode on split interfaces is the inventive insight." Weak. The specification admits bridging is conventional; the version allocation is covered in both directions by dependent claims; and Li's independent-component architecture is the substantive "split."
4. Objective indicia (secondary considerations). No evidence of unexpected results, commercial success with nexus, long-felt need, or industry praise appears on this record. Absent such evidence, Graham factor 4 does not offset the strong prima facie case. (Any such evidence would need a demonstrated nexus to the specific claimed features — e.g., the air-interface determination — not merely to IMS or tethering generally.)

8. Bottom line

On the prior-art record of this patent, independent claim 1 (and claims 9 and 17) would have been prima facie obvious over WO 2003/017705 (Ixi) in view of US 2004/0057441 (Li) and US 6,708,219 (3Com) — with the IETF/Cocquet/TetherNet NPL supplying motivation for IPv6 always-on and tethering. The strength of the case rests on: (i) Li's near-verbatim teaching of split, independently initialized IPv4 and IPv6 interfaces with a directing layer; (ii) 3Com's determine-version-then-select-stack-portion recitation; (iii) Ixi's AT-as-router/bridge to an attached LAN/TD device; and (iv) the applicant's own specification admissions that bridging, routing, and network-interface abstraction were conventional. Claims 2–8 are obvious as design choices or as admitted prior-art techniques. The single most attackable limitation is the localization of the version determination at the air interface, which the patentee may argue the references do not specifically teach — that is the pivot point for any rebuttal.

9. Uncertainty flags (per operating rules)

• NPL full text not retrieved. Touch (TetherNet Anti-NAT) and Cocquet ("IPv6 on DSL") are characterized only from the citation list on the patent's Google Patents page; I did not read their full text, so any specific-teaching attribution to them should be independently verified.
• Samsung US 2008/0304501 timing is unverified and may not qualify under § 102 at all; it is used only as corroboration.
• No litigation/validity context: consistent with the earlier litigation section, no assertion campaign against this patent was located; this analysis is a technical exercise, not tied to any proceeding.
• This is a retrospective hypothesis. A definitive § 103 conclusion would require (a) full text of all five references and the three NPL items, (b) claim construction of "air interface," "split," "bridged mode," and "interface," and (c) consideration of any objective indicia the patentee might adduce.