PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15946630
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-04
Publication Date: 2018-08
Patent Classification: ["370", "255000"]

Abstract:
Systems and methods for discovering, testing, and optimizing paths in a network are provided. According to one embodiment, configuration data of a first and second packet forwarding device is obtained by a first and second agent associated with the first and second packet forwarding devices, respectively. Existence of multiple of equal cost links coupling the first and second packet forwarding devices is discovered by a network controller based on the configuration data. For each equal cost link, the network controller then identifies a performance metric and a type of packet transported by the equal cost link by: (i) probing the equal cost link from one side with a variety of test data having different packet characteristics; (ii) recording receipt of the test data on the other side; and (ii) determining the performance metric based on the received test data and timestamps contained within the received test data.

Claim (Index 8):
A method comprising:\n discovering, by a first agent running on a first network element of a plurality of network elements in a network or a second agent running on a second network element of the plurality of network elements, a plurality of equal cost links between the first network element and the second network element; and determining for each link of the plurality of equal cost links a type of packet the link is used to transport by probing a link selection mechanism of the first network element, including:\n generating, by the first agent, a plurality of test data packets having a variety of different packet characteristics, wherein each of the plurality of test data packets has a different value for one or more of a source address, a destination address, a source port number, a destination port number, a virtual local area network (VLAN) tag, virtual extension local area network (VxLAN) tag, differentiated services code point (DSCP) bits and protocol information than all other of the plurality of test data packets; \n causing, by the first agent, the plurality of test data packets to be transmitted to the second network element via the plurality of equal cost links; and \n determining a path for each test data packet of the plurality of test data packets by recording, by the second agent, on which link of the plurality of equal cost links the first network element used to transmit the test data packet.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 32.0
- Percentile: 91.0
- Lexical Diversity: 2.14286
- Patent Class: 370.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['14955912', '13536669', '13536487', '12481151', '13424173']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.5482974721735029
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.4945366638327174
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.5429213913394243
- Mean Citation Score: 221.02548
- Max Citation Score: 292.87134
- Similarity Product: 289.4970175170171

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 1
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test