DETAILED ACTION
The following is a final office action in response to the Amendments filed on June 23, 2026.
Claims 1, 20, 37, 41 and 45 has been amended.
Claims 1-9,18-23 and 27-47 are pending.
Response to Arguments
35 U.S.C. 103 Rejections
Applicant’s argument regarding the 103 rejection filed on June 23, 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, 46-47 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 Kwak et al. (USPGPub 2018/0287682).
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) wherein each DCI includes 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 Kwak 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 (Kwak, see paragraph [0095], DCI transmitted through the PDCCH notifies a specific mapping position in the frequency domain and scheduling information).
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 Kwak and apply it on the teaching of Onggosanusi as doing so would improve data efficiency per frequency (Abdoli, see paragraph [0218]).
As per claim 4, Onggosanusi-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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-Kwak 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
Applicant's submission of an information disclosure statement under 37 CFR 1.97(c) with the timing fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(p) on 06/23/2026 prompted the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 609.04(b). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
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/HERMON ASRES/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2449
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