Appeal No. 2006-2754
Application No. 10/108,109
gateway station collects beacon from other stations to determine
whether their signal strengths meet or fall below a proximity
threshold. Gateway stations with signal strength that fall below
the threshold are ignored, whereas those that meet the threshold
are ranked on a list from most preferred to least preferred.
It is our view that one of ordinary skill in the art at the
time of the present invention would have readily found that
Ramanathan’s teachings do not amount to the Appellants’ invention
as set forth in representative claim 8. The ordinarily skilled
artisan would have duly recognized that even though Ramanathan
teaches an affiliation procedure and an affiliation check wherein
a station member can become a station gateway, such processes
however, do not involve a self-assessment of a node wherein at
least two factors are used in a formula to determine whether the
node should acquire the status of a cluster head. Ramanathan’s
procedures only involve a single factor (ability to communicate
with other gateway stations), which does not necessarily ensue
from a self assessment of the node station. Similarly, the
ordinarily skilled artisan would have duly recognized that
Ramanathan’s teaching of self-assessing whether a cluster gateway
should preserve its status is not based on two factors that are
used in a formula as required by the representative claim.
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