Packet Design Awarded First Patent for BGP Routing Technology

Business Wire, Dec 12, 2006

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Packet Design, Inc., has won its first patent for a technology that addresses security and reliability issues in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the routing protocol used by virtually all network routers for communication between service providers and large enterprises.

U.S. Patent No. 7,120,792 was awarded in October to the Packet Design BGP Scalable Transport (BST) technology. The team that created BST was led by Packet Design Chief Scientist Van Jacobson, who has been instrumental in such key Internet developments as congestion avoidance, traceroute and the Mbone. Other Packet Design technical staff members designated as inventors on the patent award are Cengiz Alaettinoglu, Kedar Poduri, Satish Kanna and Archibald Cobbs.

The purpose of the BST technology is to streamline the transport of BGP routing information, lowering the cost and overhead associated with implementing security and reliability measures. Using a technique known as flooding - recognized as faster and more reliable than point-to-point communication for disseminating information from one source to many destinations - BST lets networks scale to much greater size while reducing concerns about connection loss, security breaches, slow convergence times and configuration errors. Requiring no changes to router vendors' current BGP implementations, BGP is fully backward-compatible and incrementally deployable, allowing for seamless integration in existing networks.

Jack Bradley, Packet Design CEO, said, "We are extremely proud of our technical staff on the award of the patent for BST. This is the first successful completion of a series of patent applications we've had in progress for ground-breaking technologies in the routing and route analytics area, and we expect several more of those to come to fruition in the near future."

About Packet Design, Inc.

Packet Design, Inc., pioneered the field of route analytics and is the leading supplier of network appliances that provide routing-layer visibility into IP networks. The company's flagship products are Route Explorer, which creates an accurate layer 3 topology map and analyzes routing events to let network engineers quickly pinpoint and resolve routing and other network problems; and Traffic Explorer, which integrates traffic-flow information with real-time routing data to provide the first end-to-end, "topology-aware" view of network traffic. Packet Design products today help manage networks in global enterprises - including financial, retail and pharmaceutical firms - as well as educational institutions, government agencies, and the world's largest service providers.

Packet Design, Inc., was spun out in March 2003 from Packet Design, LLC, the fourth networking company started by entrepreneurs Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico, who previously founded Bridge Communications, Network Computing Devices and Precept Software. For more information, visit http://www.packetdesign.com.