Appeal No. 94-4400
Application 07/771,063
directly address the point made by appellants [answer, pages 6-
8]. We are of the view that the applied prior art does not
perform the method recited in claim 13 and does not provide any
suggestion for the implementation of the method of claim 13.
Claim 13 recites that “if the priority of the
transmitting node is higher than that of the receiving node and
the receiving node is not already a primary node, establishing
the receiving node as an alternate node..., otherwise,
establishing the receiving node as a primary node” [underlining
added for emphasis]. Thus claim 13 recites that a node not
having higher priority would continue as the primary node as long
as it obtained the primary node status at some point. Thus, a
request from a higher priority node for control would be ignored
by a
lower priority node that already has control. The applied prior
art cannot achieve this operation because the applied prior art
is designed to always allow the node with highest priority to
take control whenever such a node comes on line.
The examiner has not explained why this distinction
between the invention of claim 13 and the applied prior art would
have been obvious to the artisan. As we noted above, although
10
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007