On Tuesday in the Western District of Texas, WSOU Investments, LLC which does business as Brazos Licensing and Development (Brazos) filed a complaint against Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and Huawei Technologies USA Inc. (collectively referred to as Huawei) for patent infringement alleging that Huawei infringed the patent-in-suit by utilizing each element in at least claim 1 of the patent for congestion management.
The patent-in-suit is United States Patent No. 6,839,321 entitled “domain based congestion management.” According to the complaint, Huawei’s purportedly infringing product is the Huawei Cloud Engine series switches, which includes Huawei’s Cloud Engine 8800 series switches. The plaintiff stated that “Huawei provides a range of fully managed switches to manage and regulate the network traffic flow.”
Specifically, Huawei’s Accused Products “deliver high performance, high port density, and low latency for cloud-oriented data center networks and high-end campus networks.” These products reportedly “support an extensive range of data center features, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities, and high-performance stacking technologies.” The plaintiff proffered that Huawei’s Accused Products “support a QoS model (DeffServ) … which classifies packets on a network into multiple classes and takes different actions for the classes.” The DiffServ model has numerous QoS mechanisms, such as congestion management and congestion avoidance.
For example, the congestion management mechanism “buffers packets in queues upon network congestion and determines the forwarding order using a specific scheduling algorithm.” Additionally, the congestion avoidance mechanism supports Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) which “discard(s) packets based on packet priorities, so the drop probability of packets with higher priorities is low.”According to the plaintiff, these are some of the ways that Huawei has infringed its patent-in-suit, by allegedly utilizing “every element” of at least claim 1 through Huawei’s Accused Products in order to engage in congestion management.
Brazos claimed that Huawei has directly and contributorily infringed and it has induced infringement of the patent; Huawei previously received notice of its alleged infringement. Brazos has sought declaratory judgment in its favor, an award for damages, an award for costs and fees, and other relief. Brazos is represented by Etheridge Law Group, PLLC.
