Appeal No. 2006-0697
Reexamination 90/006,402
received data packet and shunt it to an appropriate fiber optic line, the determination must be
made based on routing or address information contained within the data transmission packet.
The examiner relied on Chan to meet all of the features of the appellant’s independent
claims 1, 10 and 16, except for the formatting of each data transmission packet into a header
section, a data section, and a tail section, for which the examiner relied on Tanenbaum. Chan
discloses an all-optic transmission network with three levels of network switching, Level-0,
Level-1, and Level-2. (Chan, column 2, lines 3-10 and 31-49). The disclosed system provides
three types of basic transmission services, as is stated in Chan, column 2, lines 11-22:
The network allows frequency division multiplexing to access the 25 THz
(200 nm) of fiber bandwidth and can support three basic services of: A) Point-to-
point or point-to-multipoint high speed circuit switched multi-Gbps digital or
analog sessions; B) Time division multiplexed circuit switched sessions in the
range of a few Mbps to the full channel rate of multi-Gbps; and, C) A service
used internally for control, scheduling and network management that can also be
used for datagram services. These services each have all-optical data paths, but
can use some electronics for set up and control. (Emphasis added.)
Similarly, in column 6, lines 5-11, Chan states:
The basic types of transmission services provided at the user interfaces
(henceforth identified as an Access Ports (AP) of the all-optical network) are
classified into three service types: Type A, which is a physical circuit service;
Type B, which is scheduled time division multiplexed (TDM) service; and Type
C, which is unscheduled datagram service. (Emphasis added.)
The examiner agreed with the appellant that Type A and Type B transmission service of
Chan do not meet the appellant’s claim features requiring routing information to be included or
appended to each data packet being transmitted. (Answer at page 19, lines 1-6). However, the
examiner correctly notes that Type C service of Chan, in addition to providing a service used
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