ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,381,782, issued on Aug. 5, was assigned to Cisco Technology Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).

"In-band sustainable packet management" was invented by Carlos Pignataro (Cary, N.C.), Eric A. Voit (Bethesda, Md.) and Nagendra Kumar Nainar (Morrisville, N.C.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Devices and methods that incorporate sustainability data within a header of a data packet to allow for the generation of sustainable configurations for various network devices are disclosed. Power efficiency is obtained at a node-level by including metadata to existing network flows, in an in-band/in-situ configuration. This information may be used for optimum flow p...