Appeal No. 2001-1876
Application No. 09/271,410
OPINION
In response to the section 103 rejection, appellants argue, inter alia, that
Ohsawa does not teach the limitations attributed to the reference. Appellants contend
that the sending terminal is not notified that data has been forwarded to the next hop.1
(Brief at 6-7.)
The examiner responds (Answer at 10-11) by pointing to Figure 2 of Ohsawa
and portions of columns 4, 5, and 6 of the reference. According to the examiner, the
reference shows that a notification is sent from one router to a previous router that data
has been forwarded to the next router because, at each of the routers, “data that had
been stored on its memory was erased in response to an ACK from the following node.”
(Id. at ¶ bridging pp. 10-11.) We note that the referenced sections of Ohsawa describe
a first, second, and third embodiment of the invention. The Answer appears to rely in
particular on the second embodiment (e.g., col. 4, ll. 20-33).
In any event, Ohsawa describes sending an acknowledgment signal indicating
confirmation of reception of data or that data has been transferred. One might infer, in
retrospect, that data had been forwarded to a “next hop” at some point in transfer.
However, we do not find any teaching in Ohsawa having the specificity required by the
claims before us. See, e.g., In re Kotzab, 217 F.3d 1365, 1371, 55 USPQ2d 1313,
1317 (Fed. Cir. 2000) (“[P]articular findings must be made as to the reason the skilled
1 According to appellants’ disclosure (page 2), a “hop” is the route from a subnet to a router.
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