Appeal No. 1997-1194
Application No. 08/084,668
claims 7, 9, 10, and
12 (all dependent on independent claim 6), and claims 14 and
19 (both dependent on independent claim 13), grouped together
with their base claims by Appellant and not argued separately,
is also sustained.
With respect to dependent claims 4, 5, 8, and 20, grouped
and argued separately by Appellant, we sustain the obviousness
rejection of these claims as well. Claims 4 and 20 are
directed to various entries in the virtual connection map
table including circuit numbers, state information, and next
hop router address. In addressing these limitations, the
Examiner points to the circuit entries in Shinohara’s Figure 4
and the router address information discussed at column 9,
lines 23 through 28 of Shinohara. The Examiner further
suggests (Answer, page 6) the obviousness to the skilled
artisan of including state information in the map table in
order to prevent attempted access to existing connected
circuits. In a related argument, the Examiner asserts the
obviousness of including status and configuration information
in the map table as recited in dependent claim 5 for
monitoring connection quality to ensure reliability. With
11
Page: Previous 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007