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and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114.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 10/24/2025 has been entered.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments regarding the 103 rejection have been considered and are moot because they do not apply to the new ground of rejection in the current office action, as the combination of Beale and Soe teaches each and every limitation in the amended claims 1, 4-7. Detailed response can be found in the rejection section.
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, 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, 4-7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Beale (US 20230046262) in view of Seo (US 20210185651).
Regarding claim 1, Beale discloses a method comprising:
receiving, by a user equipment (UE), bandwidth part (BWP) information ([0109-0110], enhanced for a power saving mechanism, a UE is provided by RRC signaling a bandwidth part (BWP) for SL transmissions (SL BWP) and a resource pool); and
monitoring, by the UE, control information a first BWP based on the BWP information ([0110], the UE only needs to monitor those sub-channels that have been indicated, reducing the search space and number of blind decodes necessary at the UE, PSCCH monitoring at UE),
wherein the BWP information indicates at least one of a starting position of the first BWP area and a number of contiguous resource blocks (RBs) ([0110-111], fig. 10 shows an example of resource pool configuration in a sidelink BWP 100. Each instance of the resource pool 101 (labeled A to G) consists of four sub-channels 102 and ten slots 104 starting from the second slot of the resource pool periodicity, where the resource pool periodicity 106 is sixteen slots; i.e. the start of each instance of the resource pool 101 is sixteen slots from the start of the previous resource pool instance),
wherein the UE is power saving user equipment (PS UE) ([0110][0113], those skilled in the art would appreciate that a BWP (which is well known in the art as a power saving scheme for a UE); power saving state indicates that a UE is a PS UE).
Beale does not explicitly disclose wherein the first BWP for monitoring of the PS UE is set differently from a second BWP for monitoring of the PS UE, and
wherein, among PS UEs and non-PS UEs, only the PS UEs are allowed to perform monitoring in the first BWP.
Seo discloses wherein the first BWP for monitoring of the PS UE is set differently from a second BWP for monitoring of the PS UE (Seo, [0223-233], the network may indicate the BD/CE limit for each numerology applied in the power saving mode and the normal mode using higher layer signaling, or the BD/CE limit by mode may be predefined according to numerology; different limits may be applied to the configurable BD/CE limit according to the power saving mode),
wherein, among PS UEs and non-PS UEs, only the PS UEs are allowed to perform monitoring in the first BWP. (Seo, [0230], when this is linked with power saving, the BD/CE limit for each cell and/or for each BWP may be applied only in the power saving mode or only according to the indication of the network; [0258-59], the shadow BWP may refer to a BWP for reducing power consumption and latency due to BWP changing and may refer to a BWP that does not operate in the normal mode and may operate only in the power saving mode. For example, the shadow BWP may refer to a BWP that the UE should assume, starting from a time of entering the power saving mode).
Seo also discloses monitoring, by the UE, control information a first BWP based on the BWP information (Seo, [0233], the UE may perform blind decoding or monitoring by applying the BD/CE limit defined for the BWP in the corresponding BWP indicated by the network).
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the time of effective filing to combine the teachings of exchanging BWP information as given by Beale with the teachings of setting blind encoding limits given by Seo. The motivation for doing so would have been to provide a method and device for reducing downlink control channel complexity for power saving (Seo, [0004]).
Claims 4, 6 and 7 are rejected same as claim 1 noting that Beale discloses processors, transceivers, computer readable medium and memory (Beale, fig. 3, [0053]).
Regarding claim 5, Beale and Seo disclose the UE of claim 4, wherein the PS UE communicates with at least one of another UE, a UE related to an autonomous driving vehicle, a base station (BS), or a network (Beale, fig. 1, UE communicates with a base station). It is noted that the applicant uses selective language in this claim and the examiner is only showing one of the claimed options.
Claim 3 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Beale in view of Seo further in view of Li (WO 2017000376).
Regarding claim 3, Beale and Seo disclose the method of claim 1,
Beale and Seo do not explicitly disclose wherein a size of the first BWP is configured in proportion to a number of PS UEs.
Li discloses a size of the first BWP is configured in proportion to a number of PS UEs (Li, page 5, 2nd para., the resource block group size (or bandwidth part or BWP) allocated is inversely proportional to the number of the terminals).
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the time of effective filing to combine the teachings of exchanging BWP information as given by Beale and Seo with the teachings of configuring the size of the BWP given by Li. The motivation for doing so would have been to allocate the bandwidth based on the number of UEs for fairness.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ZHENSHENG ZHANG whose telephone number is (571)270-1985. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Thursday 8:00am-6:00pm.
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/ZHENSHENG ZHANG/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2474