I'll search for this specific patent number in the USPTO database and CAFC dockets.

Let me search more specifically for any CAFC or PTAB proceedings involving this patent number.

Let me check for any PTAB/IPR or additional USPTO proceedings involving this patent.

Based on my searches of the USPTO database (via Google Patents, Justia, and the USPTO-published PDF) and CAFC/PTAB dockets, here is my summary. Note that my searches for CAFC 2026 docket entries and PTAB/IPR proceedings involving this specific patent returned no results — I found no evidence of any CAFC appeal, IPR, or PGR involving US 9332492 as of today's date.

US Patent 9,332,492 B2 — Summary

Title: Rapid acknowledgement of radio transmissions for energy minimization

Patent/Publication Number: US9332492B2 (also published as application US20140177684A1 and PCT WO2014099647A1)

Inventor: Michael Sleator

Assignee: Google Inc. (original assignee per 2012 assignment; name changed to Google LLC in 2017 — current listed assignee on Google Patents)

Filing Date: December 20, 2012 (Application No. 13/722,455; priority date also 2012-12-20)

Issue (Grant) Date: May 3, 2016

Legal Status: Active; adjusted expiration listed as 2033-02-16. Maintenance fees were paid for the 4th year (2019) and 8th year (2023), per USPTO legal-event records.

Abstract (verbatim, condensed): The disclosure relates to an acknowledgment scheme that minimizes energy requirements for acknowledging a transmission between nodes in a network. An energy-constrained node may transmit to other nodes and need only an acknowledgment from at least one proximal recipient (not necessarily the ultimate target). To minimize receiver complexity and energy, the acknowledgment scheme may employ simple on-off keying (OOK) irrespective of the modulation technique of the sending transmission. The acknowledgment comprises a series of OOK pulses sent at a specified time after receipt of the transmission, and simultaneously received acknowledgments can be processed and verified without confusion.

Independent Claims — Plain-Language Overview

There are 27 claims, of which four are independent: claims 1, 14, 18, and 23.

Claim 1 (method): A method of acknowledging a transmission using an amplitude-modulated acknowledgment, in which a sending node transmits to a first and a second receiving node, then receives acknowledgments from both substantially concurrently. The amplitudes of the two acknowledgments' modulation sequences are added together into a "combined received acknowledgment." The node then determines the modulation sequence of that combined signal and validates it. In short: overlapping acknowledgments are summed and treated as a single signal for validation.

Claim 14 (method): Similar to claim 1, but adds a specific sampling detail — the modulation sequence of the combined acknowledgment is determined starting at a sampling start time that falls within the first modulation (first pulse) of each of the two received acknowledgments. This accommodates slight timing offsets between concurrent acknowledgments.

Claim 18 (apparatus — node): A network node with a transceiver that sends a transmission to two receiving nodes and receives their acknowledgments substantially concurrently. A controller adds the amplitudes of the two modulation sequences into a combined acknowledgment, determines its modulation sequence, and validates it.

Claim 23 (apparatus — node with energy detector): A node whose energy detector receives two acknowledgments substantially simultaneously and combines (by addition) their modulation-sequence amplitudes into a combined acknowledgment signal. A controller then determines the combined signal's modulation sequence and validates it.

Key Technical Themes (from the specification)

• Acknowledgments use simple amplitude modulation (AM), specifically on-off keying (OOK), regardless of the modulation (e.g., FSK/PSK) used for the data transmission.
• Concurrent/colliding acknowledgments are additive in amplitude; because all nodes send the same predefined valid OOK pulse sequence, the summed signal still yields that same sequence, so it can be validated as if from a single node.
• Validation is sequence-matching against a predefined pattern; the sending node need not identify which node(s) acknowledged (link-based, not end-to-end, acknowledgment).
• Upon validating, the sending node can immediately enter an energy-conservation (sleep) mode, minimizing receiver idle time.
• A timing tolerance (e.g., half a bit time) defines how close acknowledgments must arrive to be processed as one; sampling occurs at nominal center bit times.

Uncertainty Notes

• I found no CAFC 2026 docket, IPR, PGR, or litigation record for this patent in my searches; absence of results suggests no such proceeding is publicly docketed, but I cannot fully rule out non-public or very recent filings.
• The "Active / expires 2033-02-16" status and maintenance-fee history come from Google Patents' mirrored USPTO legal-event data; I did not independently verify against USPTO Patent Center in this session.
• Google Patents lists the current assignee as Google LLC (via 2017 name change from Google Inc.), which matches the recorded assignment chain.

I'll search for litigation records involving US Patent 9,332,492 across multiple sources.

Let me search additional litigation databases and docket sources specifically for this patent number.

Based on my searches, I found no known litigation involving US Patent 9,332,492 as of the current date (April 26, 2026).

Search Methodology and Results

I searched the following sources and returned no litigation records for this specific patent number:

• General web/patent litigation searches for "9332492," "US9332492," and "9,332,492" — only the Google Patents page for the patent itself appeared; no docket, complaint, or case references.
• CourtListener (site:courtlistener.com) — no results for this patent number.
• Unified Patents / RPX / Docket Alarm (site:unifiedpatents.com, site:rpx.com, site:docketalarm.com) — no results for this patent number.
• CAFC/PTAB records — no appeal, IPR, or PGR involving this patent was found (consistent with the earlier patent summary in this analysis, which also found no CAFC docket or PTAB proceeding).

The searches did surface litigation involving other Google patents (e.g., Google v. Sonos litigation involving U.S. Patent Nos. 10,593,330, 10,134,398, and 7,705,565; Bluestone Ventures v. Google in W.D. Tex.), but none of those cases involve patent 9,332,492. Per your instruction, I am not treating those as relevant results.

Conclusion

No litigation is known involving US Patent 9,332,492.

• Plaintiff(s): None identified
• Defendant(s): None identified
• Jurisdiction / Case number / Filing date: N/A
• Outcome/current status: N/A — no district court case, ITC investigation, CAFC appeal, or PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM) appears to be publicly docketed for this patent.

Caveats

• The absence of results does not categorically exclude a very recent or non-public filing; however, multiple independent sources (including the patent's own "Cited By" and legal-event records, which show only maintenance-fee payments and the Google Inc. → Google LLC assignment/name change) show no litigation activity.
• The patent remains Active (expires 2033-02-16), with maintenance fees paid for years 4 (2019) and 8 (2023), which is consistent with a patent that has not been litigated or subject to an invalidity proceeding.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — no IPRs, PGRs, or CBMs have ever been instituted, denied, settled, or terminated against US 9332492 B2 (status breakdown: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied). The canonical USPTO Open Data Portal record returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent, and my supplemental web searches (including targeted searches on the patent number, title, and inventor with "IPR," "PTAB," "institution," and "final written decision" terms) surfaced nothing specific to this patent — only generic PTAB-practice articles. The bottom-line defensive posture: the patent is completely PTAB-untested and fully intact — all 27 claims stand exactly as granted, which cuts both ways: no claim is dead, but no ground has been foreclosed either, so a well-built IPR challenge remains a genuinely open option.

No proceedings to report

There are no AIA trial proceedings (IPR, PGR, or CBM) involving US 9332492 B2. Because there is nothing on file, the per-proceeding template (petitioner, filing date, panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal) cannot be filled in — and I will not fabricate a proceeding number, docket, judge panel, or decision.

What I can say with confidence, based on the record:

• PGR window closed long ago. The patent issued 2016-05-03, so the nine-month post-grant review window expired 2017-02-03. No PGR was ever filed.
• CBM is unavailable. The CBM program sunset 2020-09-16, and this patent (wireless network acknowledgment signaling) is not a "covered business method" financial-product patent in any event.
• No IPR has ever been filed against this patent as of 2026-08-27, per the ODP ingest and my searches.
• No Federal Circuit appeal of a PTAB decision exists, because there is no PTAB decision.
• For completeness: I also found no district-court litigation record tied to this patent in my earlier searches (see prior sections), which matters for § 315(b) — more on that below.

Strategic summary

Claims status. Every one of the 27 claims — the four independent claims (1, 14, 18, 23) and all 23 dependent claims — is untested and fully in force. None have been canceled, amended, or even challenged at the PTAB. The adjusted expiration is 2033-02-16, and maintenance fees were paid for years 4 (2019) and 8 (2023), so the patent is alive, current, and enforceable on its face. If you are being asserted against, the entire claim set is a live target.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to worry about, because no petitioner has ever been through a trial on this patent. Every § 102 / § 103 ground based on patents and printed publications remains available to any future petitioner — subject to two practical gates: (1) the § 315(b) one-year bar, which starts running once the challenger is served with a complaint alleging infringement of this patent (if that has already happened to you, the IPR window may be ticking or closed — check your service date immediately); and (2) the USPTO's current discretionary-denial environment, which since 2025 has featured a two-stage institution process and a declining institution rate (roughly 51% in Q2 2025 per recent practice commentary), so petition quality and art selection matter more than ever. Because the acknowledgment art here is relatively old (the specification cites wake-up-receiver and wireless-ACK-collision literature from 2008–2009), credible 102/103 combinations should be locatable — but nothing has been tested, so there is no PTAB signal on how the Board would read the "additive acknowledgments combined into one signal" claim language.

Pattern signals. There are none — no repeat petitioner, no Unified Patents / defensive-aggregator involvement, no serial filings, and no patent-owner PTAB advocacy history. The only observable behavioral signal is on the patent owner's side: Google (now Google LLC) has quietly maintained this patent through two maintenance-fee cycles but, as far as the public record shows, has never been forced to defend it at the PTAB or in court. For an NPE/troll analysis: the patent's current assignment chain is Google LLC, not a shell entity, and there is no public evidence of assertion campaigns. The absence of any IPR in roughly a decade is itself a mild signal — heavily-asserted patents of this vintage (2016 grant, energy-harvesting/sensor-network space) typically attract at least one challenge; its clean PTAB record suggests either modest assertion activity or that no accused infringer has yet found the art worth the fight.

Recommended next steps

1. Confirm your § 315(b) clock. If you have been sued or served with a complaint alleging infringement of US 9332492, the one-year IPR petition deadline runs from service. If you are pre-suit, you have the luxury of building the record now. Either way, check service dates immediately — this is the single most important gating fact.

2. Treat the PTAB as a blank slate, and build the art search accordingly. With zero PTAB history, there is no estoppel and no adverse institution precedent. Commission a fresh prior-art search focused on: (a) OOK/ASK wake-up receivers and low-power acknowledgment schemes (the specification itself cites Pletcher et al., "A 52 µW Wake-Up Receiver with -72 dBm Sensitivity Using an Uncertain-IF Architecture," IEEE JSSC, Jan. 2009, and Dutta et al., "Wireless ACK Collisions Not Considered Harmful," HotNets-VII, 2008 — both are strong starting points); and (b) mesh/sensor-network link-layer acknowledgment and broadcast-ACK aggregation art from the 2005–2012 window. The cited art in the patent's own IDS (e.g., US 7,277,417 B2 to Broadcom; US 7,738,455 B2 to Bosch; US 7,542,437 B1 to BBN; US 6,990,098 B1 to Sun) may also be fertile.

3. If you file an IPR, challenge the independent claims with an eye to the "combined/added amplitudes" limitation. Claims 1, 14, 18, and 23 each require combining the amplitudes of the two acknowledgments' modulation sequences (literally "adding") and validating the resulting sequence. The prior art needs to render obvious or anticipate that additive-ACK-plus-sequence-validation scheme — e.g., an ACK-collision-tolerant scheme where overlapping identical OOK pulses sum coherently. Cite the FWD of any analogous IPR that sustained or rejected similar "interference-as-signal" arguments (search PTAB decisions for "additive acknowledgment," "OOK," and "merged acknowledgement" — US 6,990,098 B1 is on "merged acknowledgements" and is already cited against this patent).

4. If you are the defendant and want to pressure-test without the cost of a full IPR, consider whether district-court § 101 or § 112 challenges are viable in parallel (this is a signal-processing/energy-management claim set, so § 101 is a long shot post-Alice, but indefiniteness around "timing tolerance" / "sampling start time" may have legs). Note IPR cannot reach § 101/§ 112 — only § 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications.

5. Watch for future filings. Re-run the USPTO ODP API and PTAB E2E search for this patent number quarterly. If Google begins asserting it (or assigns it to an NPE), expect petitions to appear — and the absence of prior proceedings means the first petitioner gets a clean, unencumbered shot at the whole claim set with no estoppel constraints.

Bottom line: There is no PTAB history to mine — no FWD to quote, no claim to declare dead, no panel to read. The patent is fully intact, and any infringement defense built on prior PTAB activity would be fabrication. The realistic paths are (a) a first-ever, well-researched IPR if you're within the § 315(b) window, or (b) district-court invalidity arguments on the same 102/103 grounds, where you would be writing on a completely clean slate.

Ownership Chain Analysis — US Patent 9,332,492 B2

Note on sources: I could not pull the USPTO Assignment Center directly in this session (search tool limits; live queries returned no docket data). The assignment records below are taken from the USPTO-mirrored legal events printed on the patent itself (Google Patents copy, fetched 2026-08-26), which list every recorded assignment, plus the recorded reel/frame identifiers. The correspondent-of-record field is not exposed in that source, so correspondent names are marked not captured rather than inferred. No additional assignments (security agreements, licenses, mergers, corrections) appear in the legal-event record.

Inventors

• Michael Sleator (sole named inventor). Employer at filing: Google Inc. — evidenced by the 2012-12-20 recorded assignment transferring his interest in application 13/722,455 to Google Inc. (reel 029513/0069), a standard inventor-to-employer assignment executed 2012-12-19, one day before filing.
• Unusual patterns: None observed. There is a single inventor and the assignment is a routine employment-chain record. I have no data on whether Sleator remained at Google after filing, and I will not speculate.

Original assignee

• Google Inc. (entity named on the issued patent; assignment recorded 2012-12-20, reel 029513/0069). Name changed to Google LLC effective 2017-09-29, recorded 2017-10-02 (reel 044566/0657).
• Line of business: large operating company (search, advertising, cloud, consumer hardware).
• Product embodying the claims: Unclear from available data. The claims concern OOK-based rapid acknowledgments for energy-constrained wireless nodes — plausibly tied to Google/Nest-style sensor-network or Thread/802.15.4 hardware, but I found no public confirmation that a shipped product practices the claims. I will not assert it.
• Current status: Operating. Maintenance fees paid for years 4 (2019) and 8 (2023) by Google as a large entity; patent Active with adjusted expiration 2033-02-16.

Assignment timeline

Two recorded assignments, both routine. No post-issuance transfer to any third party exists in the record.

• 2012-12-19 (executed) / recorded 2012-12-20 — Reel 029513/0069

  • Conveyance: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNOR'S INTEREST
  • Assignor: Michael Sleator
  • Assignee: Google Inc.
  • Correspondent: Not captured in available source (USPTO legal-event mirror does not expose correspondent; Assignment Center not reachable this session).
  • Context: Standard inventor-to-employer assignment on filing; no NPE implication.

• 2017-09-29 (executed, effective) / recorded 2017-10-02 — Reel 044566/0657

  • Conveyance: CHANGE OF NAME
  • Assignor: Google Inc.
  • Assignee: Google LLC
  • Correspondent: Not captured in available source.
  • Context: Corporate name change only (Google Inc. → Google LLC, 2017 corporate restructuring). No change in beneficial ownership.

Finding: The Assignment Center record for this patent, as mirrored in the legal events, contains only these two entries. The absence of post-issuance assignments means the original assignee (now Google LLC) still owns the patent.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9332492
    2012 : Filed by Google Inc
         : Sleator assigns to Google Inc
    2016 : Patent issued
    2017 : Name change to Google LLC

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. No transfer to any LLC, "IP/Holdings/Ventures" entity, registered-agent address, or licensing vehicle appears in the record. The only two recorded instruments are the inventor→employer assignment (029513/0069) and the Google Inc.→Google LLC name change (044566/0657).

2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. Neither Google Inc. nor Google LLC appears on the enumerated NPE lists (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Round Rock, etc.), and no Unified Patents/RPX high-frequency-plaintiff entity appears anywhere in the chain.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Unclear / not assessable. The correspondent field is not exposed in my source, and I could not reach Assignment Center this session. However, both recorded entries are Google corporate filings; there is no chain of shell LLCs for a repeat-player attorney to service. No recurrence signal exists in the available data.

4. Cascading transfers — Not present. Only two recorded instruments, spaced ~5 years apart, with the second being a pure name change. No chained LLC conveyances, no shared-address pattern, no <24-month transfer cascade.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. No infringement suit involving US 9,332,492 was found in the earlier litigation analysis (no district court, ITC, CAFC, or PTAB docket entries), and no assignment is dated within 6 months of any suit.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. Google Inc./LLC has not filed bankruptcy; the patent was never sold in any insolvency proceeding (contrast Kodak, Nortel, etc.).

7. Privateering — Not present. The patent never left the operating company to an NPE that would assert on Google's behalf; no SEC or press evidence of such an arrangement exists for this patent.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain terminates at Google LLC, an operating company — not RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN. (Google is a LOT Network member, but the chain does not terminate at a defensive aggregator, so the signal as defined is not triggered.)

Verdict

Insufficient data (no records beyond the original assignment and a name change).

The recorded chain is the textbook clean pattern: inventor → employer (Google Inc., reel 029513/0069, 2012-12-20) → name change to Google LLC (reel 044566/0657, 2017-10-02). Every NPE signal is negative: no shell transfer, no known asserter, no cascade, no pre-litigation transfer, no bankruptcy sale, no privateering, no defensive-aggregator terminus — and no litigation exists at all. The only reason this is not a stronger "operating-company" classification is that I found no evidence of either a product practicing the claims or an assertion suit, so per the rubric the honest call is that the record shows only routine ownership entries with no assertion activity to classify. The patent remains with Google LLC, which paid maintenance fees as recently as 2023.

Verify at the USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 9332492; confirm reel/frame 029513/0069 and 044566/0657 and check the correspondent field, which my sources did not expose).