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 1):
A method comprising:\n obtaining, by a first agent associated with a first packet forwarding device of a network, configuration data of the first packet forwarding device on behalf of a network controller of the network; obtaining, by a second agent associated with a second packet forwarding device of the network, configuration data of the second packet forwarding device on behalf of the network controller; discovering, by the network controller, existence of a plurality of equal cost links coupling the first packet forwarding device and the second packet forwarding device based on the configuration data of the first packet forwarding device and the configuration data of the second packet forwarding device; for each equal cost link of the plurality of equal cost links, identifying, by the network controller, a type of packet the equal cost link is used to transport and a performance metric of the equal cost link by:\n causing the first agent to probe the equal cost link by causing the first packet forwarding device to transmit a variety of test data having different packet characteristics including 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, a virtual extension local area network (VxLAN) tag, differentiated services code point (DSCP) bits and protocol information, wherein the type of packet is represented by specific values of the packet characteristics; \n causing the second agent to record receipt of the test data by the second packet forwarding device; and \n determining the performance metric based on the received test data and timestamps contained within the received test data.

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): 0.5467777551864604
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5038564937264197
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.5424856290404564
- Mean Citation Score: 221.02548
- Max Citation Score: 292.87134
- Similarity Product: 245.04578835913185

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