ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,418,477, issued on Sept. 16, was assigned to MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"Smart switch for offloading high bandwidth flows in a software defined network" was invented by Gerald Roy De Grace (Cumming, Ga.), Deepak Bansal (Bellevue, Wash.), Rishabh Tewari (Sammamish, Wash.), Sushant Sharma (Sammamish, Wash.), Lihua Yuan (Redmond, Wash.), Guohan Lu (Redmond, Wash.), Pranjal Shrivastava (Redmond, Wash.), Geoffrey Outhred (Seattle) and Avijit Gupta (Redmond, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Bidirectional flows of a communication session in a software defined network (SDN) are efficiently managed. A smart switch c...