Detailed Action
1. This Office Action is responsive to the Appeal Brief filed 07/27/2026. Claims 1-20 are pending for examination. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
2. In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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 to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
3. Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over He et al. (US 2024/0235994 A1), in view of Gamage et al. (US 11,838,200 B1), hereinafter “He” and “Gamage” correspondingly.
4. As to claim 1, He discloses a method for facilitating traffic steering within a segment routing (SR) over Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 (SRv6) network, the method comprising:
establishing an end-to-end SRv6 tunnel through the SRv6 network between a source software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) customer equipment (CE) node associated with a first local area network (LAN) and a destination SD-WAN CE node associated with a second LAN (FIG. 12, [0230] and [0255]: establishing an end-to-end IPv6 tunnel between head end Edge 1 associated with Branch site 1 and tail end Edge 2 associated with Headquarters site);
receiving, by the source SD-WAN CE node, LAN-side traffic originated by the first LAN and destined for the second LAN (FIG. 12, [0255]: the head end edge 1 receives traffic from a user A at the Branch site 1 to a user Z at the Headquarters site);
based at least in part on the LAN-side traffic, encapsulating, by the source SD-WAN CE node, the LAN-side traffic as payload of an IP version 6 (IPv6) packet with one or more header levels, including incorporating path information within an IPv6 Extension Header (EH) of the IPv6 packet to instruct provider edge (PE) or provider (PE/P) nodes of the SRv6 network how to steer the IPv6 packet through the SRv6 network ([0256]: the head end edge 1 obtains information about the TVC 1-3, and adds an SR tunnel encapsulation layer (namely, an outer-layer IPv6 header and an SRH) to the data packet based on the information about the TVC 1-3); and
transmitting, by the source SD-WAN CE node, the encapsulated LAN-side traffic to the destination SD-WAN CE node via the SRv6 tunnel (i.e., the edge 1[Wingdings font/0xE0]the edge 3[Wingdings font/0xE0]the edge 2) ([0257-0260]).
He does not explicitly disclose “obtaining, by the source SD-WAN CE node, path information without requiring the SD-WAN CE node to participate in a routing domain of the SRv6 network”.
In an analogous art, Gamage discloses “obtaining, by the source SD-WAN CE node, path information without requiring the SD-WAN CE node to participate in a routing domain of the SRv6 network” ([0021]: In loose source routing such as Segment Routing, a source node (Customer Edge router CE1 of Figs. 1 and 3) chooses a path or is provided a path by a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller or Path Computation Element (PCE) and encodes the chosen path in packet header as an ordered list of segments, wherein Segment Routing (SR) natively supports both IPv6 (SRv6) and MPLS (SR-MPLS) forwarding planes and can co-exist with other transport technologies).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teachings of He and Gamage to achieve the claimed invention to allow the CE node only handles standard IPv6 forwarding or simple routing protocols to peer with the provider edge (PE), rather than managing complex inner-core SRv6 topology logic.
5. As to claim 2, He-Gamage discloses the method of claim 1, wherein the path information is obtained by the SD-WAN CE node from a path computation engine of the SRv6 network (Gamage, [0021]: a source node chooses a path or is provided a path by Path Computation Element (PCE)).
6. As to claim 3, He-Gamage discloses the method of claim 1, wherein the path information is obtained by the SD-WAN CE node from a controller managing the source SD-WAN CE node (Gamage, [0021]: a source node chooses a path or is provided a path by a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller).
7. As to claim 4, He-Gamage discloses the method of claim 1, wherein the path information is obtained by the SD-WAN CE node from based on a static path configuration on the source SD-WAN CE node (He, TABLE 1, Static configuration).
8. As to claim 5, He-Gamage discloses the method of claim 1, further comprising creating a mapping within the source SD-WAN CE node of a plurality of LAN-side traffic profiles to respective paths of the SRv6 tunnel (i.e., the SR path (1) meets the constraint that a delay is less than specified duration. The SR path (2) mees the constraint that a packet loss rate is less than a specified packet loss rate) (He, [0052] and [0220]).
9. As to claim 6, He-Gamage discloses the method of claim1, further comprising handling and tracking state of SRv6 paths in a control-plane and a forwarding-plane of the source SD-WAN CE node (He, [0099] and [0786-0207]).
10. As to claims 7-20, claims 7-20 are corresponding non-transitory machine readable medium and CE node claims that recite similar limitations as of method claims 1-6 and do not contain any additional limitations with respect to novelty and/or inventive steps; therefore, they are rejected under the same rationale.
Response to Arguments
11. Applicant’s arguments with respect to claims 1, 7 and 14 have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
12. Further references of interest are cited on Form PTO-892, which is an attachment to this Office Action.
13. A shortened statutory period for reply to this action is set to expire THREE (3) months from the mailing date of this communication. See 37 CFR 1.134.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to QUANG N. NGUYEN whose telephone number is (571) 272-3886.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s SPE, KAMAL B. DIVECHA, can be reached at (571) 272-5863. The fax phone number for the organization is (571) 273-8300.
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/QUANG N NGUYEN/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2453
