These patents were not drafted in isolation; they came out of production platform work by cross-functional engineering teams. Frank is a named inventor on 12 filings across 4 patent families — arising from designing and delivering real systems at enterprise scale.
Each filing documents a solved engineering problem that met USPTO novelty standards. The surrounding platforms went on to serve large-scale, real-world workloads, which is why this body of work matters for technical and board-level decision making.
The Inference as a Service patent represents the most forward-looking of four issued USPTO patents held by Frank Moss from his work as founding architect of Lumen’s global edge cloud platform. Filed in 2023, it documents a solved engineering problem that now sits at the center of the AI infrastructure industry: how to deliver AI model inference as a managed service at the network edge, rather than centralizing it in a distant cloud data center.
Between 2014 and 2023, Moss served as founding architect of Lumen Technologies’ global edge cloud platform — a system designed to deploy environment-tolerant compute at every node along the network, from last-mile connections through the global internet backbone. The goal was sub-5ms response times for latency-sensitive applications: industrial robotics, 5G edge workloads, real-time automation.
That problem required breakthrough thinking in three areas: how hardware could be dynamically composed and decomposed across a distributed network (composable infrastructure), how traffic could be routed with network-level intelligence rather than static rules (intent-based orchestration), and how AI inference could be delivered as a managed service at the edge. The four patent families documented on this page represent the solutions to each of these problems.
The composable infrastructure and orchestration patents were filed in 2021. The Inference as a Service patent was filed in 2023. These filing dates consequently predate most of the commercial AI infrastructure conversation. That earliness is evidence of original thinking, not implementations of what others had already articulated.
All listed patents were assigned to Level 3 Communications / CenturyLink / Lumen Technologies, where the work was performed. Frank Moss is a named inventor alongside team contributors. The IP ownership remains with the assignees; inventorship reflects technical contribution. The issued patent numbers — 11,425,224 · 11,343,201 · 11,509,601 · 11,637,790 — are all searchable on Google Patents.
For advisory engagements informed by this patent portfolio, or to discuss architecture strategy in AI inference, composable infrastructure, or network orchestration, start a conversation.
All patents are publicly searchable through the USPTO Patent Full-Text Database and Google Patents. The issued patent numbers — 11,425,224 · 11,343,201 · 11,509,601 · 11,637,790 — can be searched directly. Provisional applications are not publicly published until their utility application counterparts are published; the application numbers are provided for reference.
Frank does not offer licensing for these patents because he is not the owner. He is available for architecture strategy, invention process guidance, and technical advisory informed by this work. Contact Frank directly.
Advisory engagements, technical collaboration, and strategic counsel for companies where AI infrastructure, edge compute, network intelligence, or defense and SLED architecture are at the center of the product strategy.