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 .
DETAILED ACTION
Response to Amendment
No claims have been amended, canceled or added.
Claims 1-20 are pending.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments, see Remarks filed 4/8/2026, with respect to the rejection(s) of claims 1-20 under 35 U.S.C. 103 have been fully considered and are persuasive. Therefore, the rejection has been withdrawn. However, upon further consideration, a new ground(s) of rejection is made in view of BHAGRA et al (US 2025/0039150).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
II. 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.
III. CLAIMS 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over SAWYER et al (US 2020/0267086) in view of BHAGRA et al (US 2025/0039150).
Per claim 1, SAWYER et al teach a method of routing packets in a partitioned subnet, the method comprising:
advertising a first host using a first address prefix (Abstract, paras 0018, 0020, 0028, 0043—advertising a first site/server host by services using a first subnet, address and prefix);
routing, within a fabric, traffic to the first host using a second address prefix for a host route of the first host within the fabric, wherein the second address prefix is a longer prefix than the first address prefix (paras 0020, 0028, 0032, 0037-39, 0079-81, 0093—routing traffic to the first site using second subnet, address and prefix with a larger prefix that previous advertised address);
performing a first probe that detects whether the first host is linked to the first switch (paras 0022, 0029, 0060-67—distributing probes to detect links between the catchment devices at each site and routers); and
updating a first table of the first switch based on a first result of the first probe (paras 0011-13, 0028-29, 0045-47, 0050-51, 0075-77, 0081-86, 0093-95—changing/modifying routing/traffic shifting table based on the detected probe data).
SAWYER et al teach network devices of network peers (para 0026) and the claim limitations as applied above, yet fail to explicitly teach “advertising by a data center to peers of the data center”, “routing, within a fabric of the data center”, “performing by a first switch of the data center” and “routing, within a fabric of the data center”. However, BHAGRA et al teach advertising routes by a data center by advertising prefixes within the network fabric of the data center where cloud routers connected to a data center (paras 0127, 0134-136, 0141-142), where traffic from the router go to the data center and the data center responds a second router due to the routing policy with tunnels set up between edge devices at each data center connecting a first data center to a second data center (paras 0020-21, 0059-61, 0097, 0121-123).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed the invention to combine the teachings of SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al for the purpose of advertising, performing and routing by a data center to peers, by routers and within a fabric of the data center; which are a well-known in the art being performed in multi-fabric overlay network distributed across multiple sites and data centers.
Claims 11 and 20 contain limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 1, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Per claim 2, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 1, BHAGRA et al further teach the method further comprising: updating a first table by adding to the first table the second address prefix in association with a MAC address of the first host; triggering a gateway protocol for the host route of the first host to advertise the second address prefix for the host route of the first host within the fabric of the data center; and configuring a performance measurement session for the host route of the first host (paras 0025-26, 0094, 0127-129, 0134-136, 0139-145—advertising prefixes, assigning and mapping IP address of the source, the BGP session triggering a threshold to perform a prefix split when the Gbps per tunnel has been exceeded and performing the metrics or metering of the tunnel routes; SAWYER et al: paras 0022-24, 0028, 0066, 0074-79—border gateway protocol and second address subset and prefix, performing catchment measuring, performance parameters/characteristics tracking and measuring).
Claim 12 contains limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 2, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Per claim 3, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 1, BHAGRA et al further teach the method wherein, the data center aggregates a plurality of host routes within the fabric of the data center into the first address prefix, wherein the plurality of host routes includes the host route of the first host to a single; and the plurality of host routes are de-aggregated from the first address prefix by redistributing the plurality of host routes using a gateway protocol that is triggered upon the host route of the first host or the second address prefix being added to or removed from the first table (paras 0020-21, 0060-62, 0106-109, 0139—aggregating bandwidth from a branch of the data center where the SD-WAN devices at the regional data center aggregates network traffic for smaller sites in the region, two tunnels are sent to different backends, aggregating the two tunnels and exchanging statistics for the two tunnel; more routes are distributed in BGP, a route scaling issue can be created, so prefix splitting should be performed enough times to allow traffic to be distributed evenly; SAWYER et al: paras 0022-24, 0028, 0066, 0074-79—border gateway protocol).
Claim 13 contains limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 3, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Per claim 4, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 3, wherein the gateway protocol is a border gateway protocol or an interior gateway protocol (SAWYER et al: paras 0003, 0028—border gateway protocol; BHAGRA et al paras 0020-21, 0026, 0136, 0139—border gateway protocol).
Claim 14 contains limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 4, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Per claim 5, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 1, BHAGRA et al teach the method wherein the method is performed in a network layer that is a layer 3 of an open systems interconnection model (paras 0101—third layer includes a security layer).
Claim 15 contains limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 5, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Per claim 6, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 1, BHAGRA et al teach wherein, the first host is a virtual machine running on a first server that is linked to the first switch, and the data center includes a second server that is linked to a second switch (paras 0016, 0020-21, 0046—cloud service provider, cloud routers and VPN).
Claim 16 contains limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 6, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Per claim 7, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 6, SAWYER et al teach the method furthering comprising: moving the first host from the first server to the second server; performing a second probe by the first switch that returns a second result indicating that the first host is not running on the first server; and removing the host route of the first host from the first table (paras 0051-53, 0064-65, 0095—route injectors modify records of DNS servers to produce and/or remove entries for addressing that is introduced and/or removed as a result of the first change, determining that the second probe was shifted to a site as a result of the change in addressing, shifting additional traffic to remove some traffic from the new site depending on the available resources of the new site).
Claim 17 contains limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 7, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Per claim 8, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 7, SAWYER et al further teaching the method furthering comprising: performing a third probe by the second switch that returns a third result indicating that the first host is running on the second server; and adding the host route of the first host to a second table, wherein the second table is associated with host routes of the second switch (paras 0022, 0029, 0060-67, 0076-77, 0079, 0095—distributing probes to detect links between the catchment devices at each site and routers, including addition hops, sites and entries into the table; BHAGRA et al: para 0120—lookup table and redirecting traffic).
Per claim 9, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 1, BHAGRA et al teach the method furthering comprising: performing a second probe by a second switch, the second probe returning a second result indicating that the first host is linked to the second switch; and adding the host route of the first host to a second table, wherein the second table is associated with host routes of the second switch, wherein the first host is a virtual machine that is dual-homed, such that the virtual machine is linked to the first switch and is linked to the second switch (paras 0016, 0020-21, 0046, 0064, 0097-98, 0120-121, 0125—cloud service provider, cloud routers and VPN, mapping multiple tunnels, lookup table adding via scaling and redirecting traffic, second region includes 2 routers and connects to a second data center).
Claim 18 contains limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 9, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Per claim 10, SAWYER et al and BHAGRA et al teach the method of claim 1, BHAGRA et al teach the method wherein: the first address prefix is a /24 prefix; the second address prefix is a /32 prefix; the first table is an address resolution protocol table; the first switch is a top-of-rack switch; the first probe is a performance measurement liveness probe; and the first host is a virtual machine or a virtual network function (paras 0016, 0020-21, 0046, 0094, 0139-143—address prefix /24 and /32, cloud routers, VPN and performing the metrics or metering on the backend; SAWYER et al: paras 0011, 0013, 0021, 0023-25, 0032, 0041, 0066, 0074-76, 0079—advertised address /24, performance characteristics and tracked parameters detected by probes, mappings stored in table to track shifts in traffic from a probe).
Claim 19 contains limitations that are substantially equivalent to the limitations of claim 10, and are therefore rejected under same basis.
Conclusion
IV. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure: US 2024/0205131, USPN 12665881.
V. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to KRISTIE D SHINGLES whose telephone number is (571)272-3888. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday-Thursday 10am-7pm.
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/KRISTIE D SHINGLES/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2453
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