Appeal No. 2002-1527 Page 14
Application No. 08/885,817
communications port," (Supp. Examiner's Answer at 11), the examiner asserts,
"Henrion uses bit masks to identify one or more routing groups so as to allow or block
senders from communicating with the communicate port (col 16, lines 57-60 and col 17,
line 63 - col 18, line 8)." (Id. at 23.) The appellants argue, "[i]n Henrion et al., the bit
masks are used to identify groups of output ports of a switch that are involved in a
multicast tree." (Supp. Appeal Br. at 10-11.)
1. Claim Construction
Claim 6 recites in pertinent part the following limitations: "the processor is
configured to block multicast packets received from senders blocked from sending to a
receiver as indicated by a bit-mask received with a multicast join request." Similarly,
claim 21 recites in pertinent part the following limitations: "sending a list of bit-masks
specifying at least one of a group of senders permitted to send to said user and a group
of senders prohibited from sending to said user." Also similarly, claim 30 recites in
pertinent part the following limitations: "sending a group specific multicast join request
including a bit-mask specifying at least one of a group of senders permitted to send to
said user and a group of senders prohibited from sending to said user." Giving
claims 6, 21, and 30, their broadest, reasonable construction, the limitations require a
bit-mask specifying at least one of a group of senders prohibited from sending to a
receiver.
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