DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 02/27/20226 has been entered.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 02/27/2026 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Response to Arguments
35 U.S.C. 102 Rejections
Applicant’s argument regarding the 102 rejection filed on February 27, 2026 have been fully considered but are moot because the arguments do not apply to the combination of references being used in the current rejection. For at least these reasons, applicant’s arguments are considered not persuasive.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 2, 3, 5-9, 21-23, 31-33, 39, 43 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1, 4, 18-20, 27-30, 34-38, 40-42, and 44-45 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Onggosanusi et al. (WO 2017/188736) in view of Abdoli et al. (USPGPub 2019/0313377).
As per claim 1, Onggosanusi teaches a method for wireless communications by a user equipment (UE), (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [9], user equipment (UE) is provided. The UE includes a transceiver and a processor operably connected to the transceiver) comprising:
receiving, from a network entity, at least one of a first downlink control information (DCI) or a second DCI, (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [11], decoding, by the UE, a precoding information field in DCI associated with the UL grant, where the precoding information field includes at least one PMI corresponding
to a plurality of precoders) each DCI indicating linear combination coefficients (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [107], A digital beamforming unit 410 performs a linear combination across NcsiPORT analog beams to further increase precoding gain.)
determining subband precoding based on the first DCI, the second DCI, or a combination of the first and second DCI, depending on whether the first DCI is received, the second DCI is received, or both the first and second DCI are received; (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [142], subband precoding can also be supported by signaling one PMI per subband via an UL grant where one subband can include a plurality of contiguous RBs. In this case, the DCI field containing precoding information includes multiple PMis, each associated with one subband and indicating the choice of precoder from a predetermined codebook) and
transmitting a physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) with the subband precoding (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [197], when a UE is configured with UL SU-MIMO, the UE transmits UL data on physical uplink channel (analogous to LTE PUSCH) using CPOFDM regardless of the transmission rank (the number of transmission layers).).
Onggosanusi doesn’t explicitly teach receiving at least one of a first downlink control information (DCI) or a second DCI each DCI indicating at least one of one or more frequency domain (FD) bases.
In analogous art Abdoli teaches receiving at least one of a first downlink control information (DCI) or a second DCI each DCI indicating at least one of one or more frequency domain (FD) bases (Abdoli, see paragraph [0031], a downlink control information (DCI) in a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) in an active downlink (DL) bandwidth part (BWP), the DCI for scheduling a data transmission, and the DCI comprising a frequency domain resource allocation field; and transmitting, by the base station to a user equipment (UE)).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to take the teaching of Abdoli and apply it on the teaching of Onggosanusi as doping so allows the communicating devices to reliably identify, organize and use physical resources, such as time, frequency, or time and frequency resources. (Abdoli, see paragraph [0004]).
As per claim 4, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 1, wherein: the first DCI includes at least some FD-compressed uplink subband precoding information; and the second DCI includes at least a wideband transmit precoder matrix indicator (TPMI) and some additional uplink subband precoding information (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [195], assuming the use of a single PMI/TPMI that indicates an assigned precoder subset/group. Consequently, if the UE applies frequency selective precoding to the corresponding UL transmission, the UE assumes the same precoder subset/group for all the allocated RBs).
As per claim 18, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 1, wherein the first DCI and second DCI each indicate different modulation and coding scheme (MCS) options: one MCS option for if only a single DCI and another MCS option for if both the first and second DCI are received (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [147], wherein its transmission parameters such as its location (in time and/or frequency domain) and/or payload size and/or MCS can be inferred from the first DL control information, either implicitly (e.g. from C-RNTI and/or some other UEspecific parameter)).
As per claim 19, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 1, wherein: one of the first or second DCI indicates resource allocation with MCS for if only a single DCI is received; and the other of the first or second DCI indicates no resource allocation, but with MCS for if both the first and second DCIs are received (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [147], the length of precoding information DCI field scales depending on the number of subband PMis inferred from resource allocation information where DCI field 722 represents resource allocation that requires more PMis than DCI field 721 (such as the case where more RBs are allocated for DCI field 722 compared to DCI field 721).).
As per claim 20,
[Rejection rational for claim 1 is applicable].
As per claim 27, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 23, wherein: the first DCI indicates at least one or more TPMIs and one or more sets of FD-bases associated with the TPMIs; and the coefficients in the one or more TPMIs are taken as the linear combination coefficients associated with the one or more FD-bases. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [195], assuming the use of a single PMI/TPMI that indicates an assigned precoder subset/group. Consequently, if the UE applies frequency selective precoding to the corresponding UL transmission, the UE assumes the same precoder subset/group for all the allocated RBs).
As per claim 28, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 27, wherein: the first DCI also indicates at least some quantized coefficients associated with the one or more TPMIs; and the quantized coefficients may have a one-to-one association with non-zero elements of the one or more TPMIs. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [195], assuming the use of a single PMI/TPMI that indicates an assigned precoder subset/group. Consequently, if the UE applies frequency selective precoding to the corresponding UL transmission, the UE assumes the same precoder subset/group for all the allocated RBs).
As per claim 29, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 27, wherein the additional uplink subband precoding information in the second DCI comprises an additional set of FD bases. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [147], the length of precoding information DCI field scales depending on the number of subband PMis inferred from resource allocation information where DCI field 722 represents resource allocation that requires more PMis than DCI field 721 (such as the case where more RBs are allocated for DCI field 722 compared to DCI field 721).).
As per claim 30, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 27, wherein the additional uplink subband precoding information in the second DCI comprises additional coefficient quantization information associated with non-zero elements of the one or more TPMIs in the first DCI. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [195], assuming the use of a single PMI/TPMI that indicates an assigned precoder subset/group. Consequently, if the UE applies frequency selective precoding to the corresponding UL transmission, the UE assumes the same precoder subset/group for all the allocated RBs).
As per claim 34, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 33, wherein the additional coefficient quantization information indicates quantized coefficients associated with the wideband TPMI in the second DCI. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [195], assuming the use of a single PMI/TPMI that indicates an assigned precoder subset/group. Consequently, if the UE applies frequency selective precoding to the corresponding UL transmission, the UE assumes the same precoder subset/group for all the allocated RBs).
As per claim 35, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 20, wherein the first DCI and second DCI each indicate different modulation and coding scheme (MCS) options: one MCS option for if only a single DCI and another MCS option for if both the first and second DCI are received. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [147], wherein its transmission parameters such as its location (in time and/or frequency domain) and/or payload size and/or MCS can be inferred from the first DL control information, either implicitly (e.g. from C-RNTI and/or some other UEspecific parameter)).
As per claim 36, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the method of claim 20, wherein: one of the first or second DCI indicates resource allocation with MCS for if only a single DCI is received; and the other of the first or second DCI indicates no resource allocation, but with MCS for if both the first and second DCIs are received. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [147], wherein its transmission parameters such as its location (in time and/or frequency domain) and/or payload size and/or MCS can be inferred from the first DL control information, either implicitly (e.g. from C-RNTI and/or some other UEspecific parameter)).
As per claim 37,
[Rejection rational for claim 1 is applicable].
As per claim 38, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the apparatus of claim 37, wherein: both the first and second DCIs include a common first set of one or more FD-bases and coefficients; and at least one of the first and second DCIs also contains a second set of one or more FD- bases and coefficients different from the common first set of FD-bases and coefficients. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [147], the length of precoding information DCI field scales depending on the number of subband PMis inferred from resource allocation information where DCI field 722 represents resource allocation that requires more PMis than DCI field 721 (such as the case where more RBs are allocated for DCI field 722 compared to DCI field 721).).
As per claim 40, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the apparatus of claim 37, wherein: the first DCI includes at least some FD-compressed uplink subband precoding information; and the second DCI includes at least a wideband transmit precoder matrix indicator (TPMI) and some additional uplink subband precoding information. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [195], assuming the use of a single PMI/TPMI that indicates an assigned precoder subset/group. Consequently, if the UE applies frequency selective precoding to the corresponding UL transmission, the UE assumes the same precoder subset/group for all the allocated RBs).
As per claim 41,
[Rejection rational for claim 1 is applicable].
As per claim 42, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the apparatus of claim 41, wherein: both the first and second DCIs include a common first set of one or more FD-bases and coefficients; and at least one of the first and second DCIs also contains a second set of one or more FD- bases and coefficients different from the common first set of FD-bases and coefficients. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [195], assuming the use of a single PMI/TPMI that indicates an assigned precoder subset/group. Consequently, if the UE applies frequency selective precoding to the corresponding UL transmission, the UE assumes the same precoder subset/group for all the allocated RBs).
As per claim 44, Onggosanusi-Abdoli teaches the apparatus of claim 41, wherein: the first DCI includes at least some FD-compressed uplink subband precoding information; and the second DCI includes at least a wideband transmit precoder matrix indicator (TPMI) and some additional uplink subband precoding information. (Onggosanusi, see paragraph [195], assuming the use of a single PMI/TPMI that indicates an assigned precoder subset/group. Consequently, if the UE applies frequency selective precoding to the corresponding UL transmission, the UE assumes the same precoder subset/group for all the allocated RBs).
As per claim 45,
[Rejection rational for claim 1 is applicable].
Conclusion
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/HERMON ASRES/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2449