Appeal No. 2004-0852
Application No. 09/354,651 Page 6
protocol (TDP) in order that said routers can
tell their neighboring routers the tags they want
to see in the packets that they receive (see Rekhter,
colunm 9, line 63 to column 10, line 7 and column 14,
lines 44 onwards). Consequently, this part of the
disclosure of Rekhter is not directed to the establishment of a
communications session between end points where
said end points inform each other of their respective
IP addresses and share a session identifier. In the
case of Rekhter, the tags are communicated between
routers separately to any communication session
being established between end points, said tags
being stored in routing tables for use in connecting
with routing packets across the network on a per hop
basis.
The examiner responds (answer, page 9) by directing our
attention, inter alia, to chapter 13 of the textbook
"Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume I Principles, Protocols, and
Architectures," by Douglas Comer, Prentice Hall, Third Edition,
1995 as background on TCP/IP. The examiner notes (id.) that
"[e]ach router along the path from the source to the destination
only needs to perform processing of the packet at layers 1 and 2
in order to route the packet to the next router." It is argued
(answer, page 10) that during the TCP set-up phase, the source
and destination end points exchange addresses and a session
identifier, and that utilizing the TCP/IP protocol sessions,
switched virtual circuits (SVCs) are set up and data packets are
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