Appeal No. 1997-2066
Application 08/537,408
Examiner's suggestion (at EA13-14) that if the claimed
invention is an improvement to an existing system, the claims
should be in Jepson format under 37 CFR § 1.75(e), U.S. patent
law does not compel that claims be put in Jepson format. The
Examiner has not established that one of ordinary skill in the
art would have been unable to implement the claimed method
steps or programming logic without undue experimentation. For
example, the Examiner does not explain why one of ordinary
skill in the art would have been unable to program a node to
perform the step of "(a) the node selecting a second access
point as a candidate for accepting a handoff of the node from
a first access point" (claim 1) without undue experimentation.
The specification discloses that the node might make this
determination based on the quality of the signal
(specification, p. 9). Appellant's declaration, paragraph 8,
notes that the Kahn article describes that there are several
ways a packet radio can determine the quality of a radio link
and, based upon this disclosure, it was within the level of
ordinary skill in the art to build a node packet radio
programmed to select another packet radio (a second access
point) as a candidate for handoff. Moreover, Gilhousen
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