DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments, filed 07/24/26, with respect to the rejection(s) of claim(s) 1-16 and 19-222 have been fully considered and are persuasive. Therefore, the Final Rejection dated 05/05/26 has been withdrawn. However, upon further consideration, a new ground(s) of rejection is made in view of newly cited portions of KS (Pat No 9967178) further in view of Believeau (Pub No 20130163427) and Chen (Pub No 20190245775)
Regarding claim 19,
Applicant argues that the prior art teach “user input comprising a record description selected from a set of record description templates and the record description including a preselected set of flow
record fields".
The examiner relies on newly cited prior art KS to teach the amended limitation.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 1-16, 21-22 allowed.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 19-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over KS (Pat No 9967178) further in view of Believeau (Pub No 20130163427), and Gross (Pub No 20130142048)
Regarding claim 19,
KS teaches A method of operating a controller that controls one or more switches and controls network flow information generation circuitry coupled to the one or more switches, the method comprising: (interpreted as Controller 320 may perform these processes in response to executing software instructions stored by a non-transitory computer-readable medium. A computer-readable medium is defined herein as a non-transitory memory device, see col 7 line 35-40)
Receiving user input, the user input comprising a record description selected from a set of record description templates and the record description including a preselected set of flow record fields; (interpreted as a network administrator may provide input, via client device 250, to identify the second template and/or the fields to be included in the second template (e.g., fields associated with values that may remain the same between exports and/or may remain the same based on receiving additional packets), see col 13 line 10-20)
Providing network flow information generation policy to the network flow information generation circuitry to generate network flow information according to the network flow information generation policy; (interpreted as In some implementations, exporter device 220 may receive information identifying the first template (e.g., may be pre-configured with the first template and/or may receive the first template from another device, such as client device 250), see col 11 line 36-45)
Controlling the one or more switches to forward a network packet to the network flow information generation circuitry; (interpreted as In some implementations, switching component 310 may enable input components 305, output components 315, and/or controller 320 to communicate see col 6 line 55-60)
Controlling the network flow information generation circuitry to update a plurality of fields in a flow record according to the record description; and (interpreted as The exporter device may generate the first flow record to include information corresponding to each field (e.g., information from the flow table) and may export the first flow record to the collector server, see col 4 line 9-15. Also see Each flow record may include multiple fields corresponding to information associated with the flow (e.g., a source IP address, a destination IP address, a quantity of packets associated with the flow, a quantity of bytes associated with the flow, etc., see col 2 line 32-40)
Controlling the network flow information generation circuitry to update, by executing the set of instructions on the network packet, the plurality of fields in the flow record with information extracted from the network packet to generate the flow record for the network packet. (interpreted as The exporter device may generate the first flow record to include information corresponding to each field (e.g., information from the flow table) and may export the first flow record to the collector server, see col 4 line 9-15. Also see Each flow record may include multiple fields corresponding to information associated with the flow (e.g., a source IP address, a destination IP address, a quantity of packets associated with the flow, a quantity of bytes associated with the flow, etc., see col 2 line 32-40).
However KS does not teach generating a set of instructions based on the flow information
Beliveau teaches to generate, based on a record description in the network flow information generation policy a set of instructions indicative of actions to be performed on the network packet (interpreted as The translator 113, through the use of its compiler 114, thus acts as a parser generator (i.e., compiler-compiler, or compiler generator) by generating code for a packet parser in the form of parser code 116 from the formal abstractions (i.e. a type of grammar) provided by the processing definition 112, see para [0055]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to use to combine the flow record taught by KS with the instructions/code as taught by Beliveau with the motivation of being able to implement the rules of the flows by using the set of instructions.
However KS in view of Beliveau do not teach performing the steps by a controller
Gross teaches performing the steps by a controller (interpreted as Specifically, the control daemon 1115, in some embodiments, receives configuration information from the controller cluster 1105 and configures the controller patch 1130. For example, the control daemon 1115 receives commands from the controller cluster 1105 regarding operations for processing and routing packets that the managed switching element 810 receives, see para [0190] When configured, the controller patch 1130 contains rules (e.g., flow entries) regarding processing and forwarding the packets to receive, see para [0192]))
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to use to combine system taught by KS with controller taught by Gross with the motivation of having a manager for performing the controlling and organizing of routing functions of the system.
Regarding claim 20,
KS teaches The method defined in claim 19, wherein the flow record is reconciled with a depository of finalized flow records, the method further comprising:
Controlling the one or more switches to forward at least a portion of the depository of finalized flow records and the record description to the one or more switches. (interpreted as Exporter device 220 may be configured with information identifying one or more templates and may generate flow records based on the one or more templates. In some implementations, exporter device 220 may generate, process, and/or transfer flow records, such as data records, template records, and/or other flow records, see col 5 line 18-24)
However KS in view of Beliveau do not teach performing the steps by a controller
Gross teaches performing the steps by a controller (interpreted as Specifically, the control daemon 1115, in some embodiments, receives configuration information from the controller cluster 1105 and configures the controller patch 1130. For example, the control daemon 1115 receives commands from the controller cluster 1105 regarding operations for processing and routing packets that the managed switching element 810 receives, see para [0190] When configured, the controller patch 1130 contains rules (e.g., flow entries) regarding processing and forwarding the packets to receive, see para [0192]))
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to use to combine system taught by KS with controller taught by Gross with the motivation of having a manager for performing the controlling and organizing of routing functions of the system.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to BAO G NGUYEN whose telephone number is (571)272-7732. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 10pm - 6:30pm.
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/BAO G NGUYEN/Examiner, Art Unit 2461
/HUY D VU/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2461
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