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 .
This office action is in response to remarks filed on 11/07/2025.
Claims 1-5, 9-15 and 19-20 are pending and presented for examination. Claims 1, 2, 9, 10 and 14 are amended. Claims 6-8 and 16-18 are cancelled.
Response to Amendments
Claims 1, 2, 9, 10 and 14 have been considered based on amendments.
Objections to claims 2 and 10 are withdrawn based on amendments to these claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or non-obviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1-5, 9-15 and 19-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over De Carvalho (WO2016070122A1) (hereinafter "De Carvalho") in view of Wu et al (US20210337416A1) (hereinafter "Wu").
Regarding claim 1, De Carvalho a communication method, comprising:
sending, by a network device, a first signal (Pg. 11, Ln. 14-15: At iteration (k), weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit a training sequence from Device A to Device B) on a first resource (Pg. 13, Ln. 7-10: one time slot may contain a training period followed by uplink and downlink data transmission. At the beginning of each time slot, a training period may be divided into slots that are alternatively dedicated to direct and reverse transmission.) element to a first terminal device (Pg. 17, ln 22-23: Device A is base station and the at least one second device, for example, Device B, is at least one user.);
receiving, by the network device, a fourth signal (Pg. 12, Ln. 1-2: Weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit a training sequence from Device B to Device A.) on a second resource element, wherein the second resource element and the first resource element at least partially overlap or are adjacent to each other (Pg. 13, Ln. 7-10: one time slot may contain a training period followed by uplink and downlink data transmission. At the beginning of each time slot, a training period may be divided into slots that are alternatively dedicated to direct and reverse transmission.);
sending, by the network device, downlink data (Pg. 13, Ln. 7-10: one time slot may contain a training period followed by uplink and downlink data transmission.) by using a first beamforming (BF) weight (Pg. 12, Ln. 10-13: Device A may take the complex conjugate of (
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) and obtain (
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). Device A may normalize (
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) so that when the normalized version of (
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) is employed as transmit beamforming weights, the transmit power constraint of the communication system is satisfied.), wherein the first BF weight is obtained based on signal processing performed on the fourth signal (Pg. 3, Ln. 12-15: an iterative procedure relying on ping-pong transmissions between two antenna arrays, where, at each iteration, a device simply returns the conjugate of the signal that it was just served. Ping-Pong Beamforming (PPB) converges to the optimal beamforming weights at each communication end), and an operation amount of the signal processing is less than an operation amount of matrix inversion or matrix decomposition (Pg. 5, Ln. 2-4: the application of PPB appears as a reasonable low complexity alternative to find the channel eigenvectors rather than direct channel estimation followed by a singular value decomposition.);
De Carvalho fails to disclose a communication method, comprising: receiving, by the network device, a first request message, wherein the first request message instructs the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and sending, by the network device, first indication information, wherein the first indication information indicates the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element.
However, Wu discloses a communication method, comprising:
receiving, by the network device, a first request message, wherein the first request message instructs the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and ([0099] The UE may send the report information to the base station by using an uplink channel such as a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH), a scheduling request (SR), or a physical random access channel (PRACH) … The resource element set may be in a unit of a resource block (RB), or may be in a unit of a sub-RB. A base station may determine, based on a time-frequency position at which the report information is received and additional orthogonal code (for example, orthogonal preamble code, to further increase a maximum quantity of UEs that support simultaneous sending of the report information), UE from which the report information is received.)
sending, by the network device, first indication information, wherein the first indication information indicates the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element ([0074] Step 302: The UE receives feedback information from the base station, where the feedback information includes sending status information of the one or more downlink reference signals. [0094] As shown in FIG. 4e, an uplink resource that is used by the UE to send the report information is configured after every two detection locations of the RLM RSs. When receiving the feedback information after the resource 3, the UE updates N310.).
De Carvalho and Wu are considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because both are in the same endeavor of ascertaining the position of a resource element.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have a motivation to combine the teachings of De Carvalho and Wu to create a communication method, comprising: receiving, by the network device, a first request message, wherein the first request message instructs the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and sending, by the network device, first indication information, wherein the first indication information indicates the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element.
The motivation to combine both references would come from the need to correlate a resource element with a particular terminal.
Regarding claim 2, De Carvalho discloses the method, wherein:
the network device uses the first BF weight to send downlink data to the first terminal device (Pg. 13, Ln. 7-10: one time slot may contain a training period followed by uplink and downlink data transmission.);
the first signal is a random signal or a downlink single-user beamforming (SU-BF) weight used when the network device sends downlink data to the first terminal device on the first resource element or the second resource element (Pg. 38 [0005] Example 1 includes one or more computer-readable media having instructions that, when executed, cause a first device to: send a first training signal using a first weight vector to a second device. Pg. 39, Ln. 10-14: the first device to: perform the ping-pong beamforming process using a first transmission protocol to exchange messages with the second device, the first transmission protocol comprises a plurality of time slots with individual time slots being dedicated to one transmission direction and having a training period followed by a data period.]);
the first BF weight is an SU-BF weight used when the network device sends downlink data to the first terminal device (Pg. 39, Ln. 2-3: the first weight vector is a randomly chosen value or a value determined by a second iteration of the ping-pong beamforming process that precedes the first iteration); and
the first terminal device is a terminal device in a single-user multiple-input multiple-output (SU-MIMO) transmission mode (Pg. 17, Ln. 21-23: the ping pong beam training may be established in a multiuser MIMO setup, wherein Device A is base station and the at least one second device, for example, Device B, is at least one user. Pg. 35, Ln. 27-29: The description shows the principles of ping-pong beamforming as an efficient method to estimate the maximal eigenvectors of a MIMO channel in a single user and multi-user set-up, assuming channel reciprocity.).
Regarding claim 3, De Carvalho discloses the method, wherein the network device uses the first BF weight is to send downlink data to a second terminal device,
the first signal is a downlink single-user beamforming (SU-BF) weight corresponding to the second terminal device (Pg. 17, Ln. 30-31 and Pg. 18, Ln. 1-6: Similarly to the single user case, the training mode and data mode may be distinguished as follows. In training mode, parallel tracking of the maximal eigenvectors of each user channel may be performed. This may be enabled by the use of one orthogonal training sequence per user. In data mode, transmit and receive beamforming at the base station and the user devices may be designed based on estimates of the maximal eigenvectors to account for inter-user interference at the devices.), the first BF weight is a multi-user beamforming (MU-BF) weight (Pg. 36, Ln. 15-18: PPB may be extended to a multi-user MIMO communication setting where a single stream is sent per user. Training procedures are devised where the eigenvectors of each user's channel is tracked.), and the first terminal device and the second terminal device are terminal devices in a multi-user multiple- input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) transmission mode (Pg. 39, Ln. 24-27: wherein the first device is a base station, the second device is a user device, and the instructions, when executed, further cause the base station to: perform a ping-pong beamforming process, which includes said send, receive, estimate, determine, and normalize, in a multi-user multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) process).
Regarding claim 4, De Carvalho discloses the method, further comprising:
receiving, by the network device, a fifth signal on a third resource element (Pg. 21, Ln. 11-12: Weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit a training sequence from device BP to device A.), wherein the third resource element and the first resource element at least partially overlap or are adjacent to each other; and (Pg. 17, Ln. 28-31 and Pg. 18, Ln. 1-3: The ability to track the maximal eigenvector of a large MIMO channel is desired and is the feature that is preserved in the extension of PPB to the multi-user set-up … In training mode, parallel tracking of the maximal eigenvectors of each user channel may be performed. This may be enabled by the use of one orthogonal training sequence per user.)
sending, by the network device, a sixth signal to a third terminal device on a fourth resource element (Pg. 20, Ln. 18-19: At iteration (k), weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit the training sequence (sp) from device (A) to device (BP).), wherein the fourth resource element and the second resource element at least partially overlap or are adjacent to each other (Pg. 20, Ln. 11-13: all the training sequences ({ sp,p = 1,...,P}) may be mutually orthogonal, where P is the number of users.), the sixth signal is obtained based on signal processing performed on the fifth signal (Pg. 20, Ln. 14-15: The weights vectors may be initialized by randomly chosen values or using the weights given by a previous instantiation of the method.), an operation amount of the signal processing is less than the operation amount of the matrix inversion or the matrix decomposition (Pg. 5, Ln. 2-4: the application of PPB appears as a reasonable low complexity alternative to find the channel eigenvectors rather than direct channel estimation followed by a singular value decomposition.), the network device uses the sixth signal to receive the fourth signal on the second resource element, and the first terminal device, the second terminal device, and the third terminal device are terminal devices in the MU- MIMO transmission mode (Pg. 20, Ln. 1-6: A second aspect of the present disclosure may include a method for estimating the beamforming weight vectors used for transmission and reception of several streams of data between one first device, for example, device A, and several devices, for example, devices BP, in a time division duplexing system. One stream of data may be transmitted between device A and one given device BP. All devices (A and BP) may have a plurality of antenna elements.).
Regarding claim 5, De Carvalho discloses the method, wherein the signal processing comprises a conjugate operation and/or a normalization operation (Pg. 17, Ln. 18-24: Example 1 includes one or more computer-readable media having instructions that, when executed, cause a first device to: … determine a third weight vector based on a complex conjugate of the estimate; and normalize the third weight vector.).
Regarding claim 9, De Carvalho discloses a network device, comprising:
at least one processor; and (Pg. 37, Ln. 17-18: The computing apparatus 1500 may include one or more processors 1504 coupled with one or more storage media 1508.)
one or more memories including computer instructions that, when executed by the at least one processor, cause the network device to perform operations comprising (Pg. 37, Ln. 23-24: The storage media 1508 may be used to load and store data or instructions (collectively "logic 1512") for operations performed by the processors 1504.):
sending a first signal (Pg. 11, Ln. 14-15: At iteration (k), weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit a training sequence from Device A to Device B) on a first resource (Pg. 13, Ln. 7-10: one time slot may contain a training period followed by uplink and downlink data transmission. At the beginning of each time slot, a training period may be divided into slots that are alternatively dedicated to direct and reverse transmission.) element to a first terminal device (Pg. 17, ln 22-23: Device A is base station and the at least one second device, for example, Device B, is at least one user.);
receiving a fourth signal (Pg. 12, Ln. 1-2: Weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit a training sequence from Device B to Device A.) on a second resource element, wherein the second resource element and the first resource element at least partially overlap or are adjacent to each other (Pg. 13, Ln. 7-10: one time slot may contain a training period followed by uplink and downlink data transmission. At the beginning of each time slot, a training period may be divided into slots that are alternatively dedicated to direct and reverse transmission.);
sending downlink data (Pg. 13, Ln. 7-10: one time slot may contain a training period followed by uplink and downlink data transmission.) by using a first beamforming (BF) weight (Pg. 12, Ln. 10-13: Device A may take the complex conjugate of (
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) and obtain (
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). Device A may normalize (
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) so that when the normalized version of (
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) is employed as transmit beamforming weights, the transmit power constraint of the communication system is satisfied.), wherein the first BF weight is obtained based on signal processing performed on the fourth signal (Pg. 3, Ln. 12-15: an iterative procedure relying on ping-pong transmissions between two antenna arrays, where, at each iteration, a device simply returns the conjugate of the signal that it was just served. Ping-Pong Beamforming (PPB) converges to the optimal beamforming weights at each communication end), and an operation amount of the signal processing is less than an operation amount of matrix inversion or matrix decomposition (Pg. 5, Ln. 2-4: the application of PPB appears as a reasonable low complexity alternative to find the channel eigenvectors rather than direct channel estimation followed by a singular value decomposition.).
De Carvalho fails to disclose a network device, comprising: receiving, by the network device, a first request message, wherein the first request message instructs the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and sending, by the network device, first indication information, wherein the first indication information indicates the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element.
However, Wu discloses a network device, comprising:
receiving, by the network device, a first request message, wherein the first request message instructs the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and ([0099] The UE may send the report information to the base station by using an uplink channel such as a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH), a scheduling request (SR), or a physical random access channel (PRACH) … The resource element set may be in a unit of a resource block (RB), or may be in a unit of a sub-RB. A base station may determine, based on a time-frequency position at which the report information is received and additional orthogonal code (for example, orthogonal preamble code, to further increase a maximum quantity of UEs that support simultaneous sending of the report information), UE from which the report information is received.)
sending, by the network device, first indication information, wherein the first indication information indicates the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element ([0074] Step 302: The UE receives feedback information from the base station, where the feedback information includes sending status information of the one or more downlink reference signals. [0094] As shown in FIG. 4e, an uplink resource that is used by the UE to send the report information is configured after every two detection locations of the RLM RSs. When receiving the feedback information after the resource 3, the UE updates N310.).
De Carvalho and Wu are considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because both are in the same endeavor of ascertaining the position of a resource element.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have a motivation to combine the teachings of De Carvalho and Wu to create a network device, comprising: receiving, by the network device, a first request message, wherein the first request message instructs the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and sending, by the network device, first indication information, wherein the first indication information indicates the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element.
The motivation to combine both references would come from the need to correlate a resource element with a particular terminal.
Regarding claim 10, De Carvalho discloses the network device, wherein the network device uses the first BF weight to send downlink data to the first terminal device,
the first signal is a random signal or a downlink single-user beamforming (SU-BF) weight used when the network device sends downlink data to the first terminal device on the first resource element or the second resource element (Pg. 38 [0005] Example 1 includes one or more computer-readable media having instructions that, when executed, cause a first device to: send a first training signal using a first weight vector to a second device. Pg. 39, Ln. 10-14: the first device to: perform the ping-pong beamforming process using a first transmission protocol to exchange messages with the second device, the first transmission protocol comprises a plurality of time slots with individual time slots being dedicated to one transmission direction and having a training period followed by a data period.]), the first BF weight is an SU-BF weight used when the network device sends downlink data to the first terminal device (Pg. 39, Ln. 2-3: the first weight vector is a randomly chosen value or a value determined by a second iteration of the ping-pong beamforming process that precedes the first iteration), and the first terminal device is a terminal device in a single-user multiple-input multiple-output (SU-MIMO) transmission mode(Pg. 17, Ln. 21-23: the ping pong beam training may be established in a multiuser MIMO setup, wherein Device A is base station and the at least one second device, for example, Device B, is at least one user. Pg. 35, Ln. 27-29: The description shows the principles of ping-pong beamforming as an efficient method to estimate the maximal eigenvectors of a MIMO channel in a single user and multi-user set-up, assuming channel reciprocity.).
Regarding claim 11, De Carvalho discloses the network device, wherein the network device uses the first BF weight to send downlink data to a second terminal device,
the first signal is a downlink single-user beamforming (SU-BF) weight corresponding to the second terminal device (Pg. 17, Ln. 30-31 and Pg. 18, Ln. 1-6: Similarly to the single user case, the training mode and data mode may be distinguished as follows. In training mode, parallel tracking of the maximal eigenvectors of each user channel may be performed. This may be enabled by the use of one orthogonal training sequence per user. In data mode, transmit and receive beamforming at the base station and the user devices may be designed based on estimates of the maximal eigenvectors to account for inter-user interference at the devices.), the first BF weight is a multi-user beamforming (MU-BF) weight (Pg. 36, Ln. 15-18: PPB may be extended to a multi-user MIMO communication setting where a single stream is sent per user. Training procedures are devised where the eigenvectors of each user's channel is tracked.), and the first terminal device and the second terminal device are configured to operate in a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) transmission mode (Pg. 39, Ln. 24-27: wherein the first device is a base station, the second device is a user device, and the instructions, when executed, further cause the base station to: perform a ping-pong beamforming process, which includes said send, receive, estimate, determine, and normalize, in a multi-user multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) process).
Regarding claim 12, De Carvalho discloses the network device, wherein the operations further comprise:
receiving a fifth signal on a third resource element (Pg. 21, Ln. 11-12: Weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit a training sequence from device BP to device A.), wherein the third resource element and the first resource element at least partially overlap or are adjacent to each other; and ((Pg. 17, Ln. 28-31 and Pg. 18, Ln. 1-3: The ability to track the maximal eigenvector of a large MIMO channel is desired and is the feature that is preserved in the extension of PPB to the multi-user set-up … In training mode, parallel tracking of the maximal eigenvectors of each user channel may be performed. This may be enabled by the use of one orthogonal training sequence per user.)
sending a sixth signal to a third terminal device on a fourth resource element, wherein the fourth resource element (Pg. 20, Ln. 18-19: At iteration (k), weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit the training sequence (sp) from device (A) to device (BP).) and the second resource element at least partially overlap or are adjacent to each other (Pg. 20, Ln. 11-13: all the training sequences ({ sp,p = 1,...,P}) may be mutually orthogonal, where P is the number of users.), the sixth signal is obtained based on signal processing performed on the fifth signal, an operation amount of the signal processing is less than the operation amount of the matrix inversion or the matrix decomposition (Pg. 5, Ln. 2-4: the application of PPB appears as a reasonable low complexity alternative to find the channel eigenvectors rather than direct channel estimation followed by a singular value decomposition.), the network device uses the sixth signal to receive the fourth signal on the second resource element, and the first terminal device, the second terminal device, and the third terminal device are terminal devices in the MU-MIMO transmission mode (Pg. 20, Ln. 1-6: A second aspect of the present disclosure may include a method for estimating the beamforming weight vectors used for transmission and reception of several streams of data between one first device, for example, device A, and several devices, for example, devices BP, in a time division duplexing system. One stream of data may be transmitted between device A and one given device BP. All devices (A and BP) may have a plurality of antenna elements.).
Regarding claim 13, De Carvalho discloses the network device, wherein the signal processing comprises a conjugate operation or a normalization operation (Pg. 17, Ln. 18-24: Example 1 includes one or more computer-readable media having instructions that, when executed, cause a first device to: … determine a third weight vector based on a complex conjugate of the estimate; and normalize the third weight vector.).
Regarding claim 14, De Carvalho discloses a first terminal device, comprising:
at least one processor; and (Pg. 37, Ln. 17-18: The computing apparatus 1500 may include one or more processors 1504 coupled with one or more storage media 1508.)
one or more memories including computer instructions that, when executed by the at least one processor, cause the first terminal device to perform operations comprising (Pg. 37, Ln. 23-24: The storage media 1508 may be used to load and store data or instructions (collectively "logic 1512") for operations performed by the processors 1504.):
receiving a second signal on a first resource element (Pg. 11, Ln. 14-15: At iteration (k), weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit a training sequence from Device A to Device B);
sending a third signal to a network device (Pg. 12, Ln. 1-2: Weight vector (
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) may be employed to transmit a training sequence from Device B to Device A.) on a second resource element, wherein the second resource element and the first resource element at least partially overlap or are adjacent to each other, the third signal is obtained based on signal processing performed on the second signal (Pg. 13, Ln. 7-10: one time slot may contain a training period followed by uplink and downlink data transmission. At the beginning of each time slot, a training period may be divided into slots that are alternatively dedicated to direct and reverse transmission.), and an operation amount of the signal processing is less than an operation amount of matrix inversion or matrix decomposition (Pg. 5, Ln. 2-4: the application of PPB appears as a reasonable low complexity alternative to find the channel eigenvectors rather than direct channel estimation followed by a singular value decomposition.).
De Carvalho fails to disclose a first terminal device, comprising: sending a first request message instructing the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and receiving first indication information indicating the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element.
However, Wu discloses a first terminal device, comprising:
sending a first request message instructing the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and ([0099] The UE may send the report information to the base station by using an uplink channel such as a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH), a scheduling request (SR), or a physical random access channel (PRACH) … The resource element set may be in a unit of a resource block (RB), or may be in a unit of a sub-RB. A base station may determine, based on a time-frequency position at which the report information is received and additional orthogonal code (for example, orthogonal preamble code, to further increase a maximum quantity of UEs that support simultaneous sending of the report information), UE from which the report information is received.)
receiving first indication information indicating the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element ([0074] Step 302: The UE receives feedback information from the base station, where the feedback information includes sending status information of the one or more downlink reference signals. [0094] As shown in FIG. 4e, an uplink resource that is used by the UE to send the report information is configured after every two detection locations of the RLM RSs. When receiving the feedback information after the resource 3, the UE updates N310.).
De Carvalho and Wu are considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because both are in the same endeavor of ascertaining the position of a resource element.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have a motivation to combine the teachings of De Carvalho and Wu to create a first terminal device, comprising: sending a first request message instructing the network device to determine a position of the first resource element; and receiving first indication information indicating the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element.
The motivation to combine both references would come from the need to correlate a resource element with a particular terminal.
Regarding claim 15, De Carvalho discloses the first terminal device, wherein the signal processing comprises a conjugate operation or a normalization operation (Pg. 17, Ln. 18-24: Example 1 includes one or more computer-readable media having instructions that, when executed, cause a first device to: … determine a third weight vector based on a complex conjugate of the estimate; and normalize the third weight vector.).
Regarding claim 19, De Carvalho discloses the first terminal device, wherein the operations further comprise: sending a second request message to the network device to send a first signal and/or obtain a first beamforming (BF) weight, the second signal is formed after the first signal is processed by a downlink air interface channel (Pg. 38, Ln. 20-24: receive, from the second device, a second training signal sent using a second weight vector), and the first BF weight is used by the network device to send downlink data to the first terminal device or a second terminal device (Pg. 39, Ln. 15-17: wherein the instructions, when executed, further cause the device to: perform an initialization procedure to acquire the first weight vector in a first time slot; and send the first training signal in a second time slot that follows the first time slot.).
Regarding claim 20, De Carvalho discloses the first terminal device, wherein the operations further comprise: receiving second indication information instructing the first terminal device to receive the second signal and/or obtain the third signal (Pg. 39, Ln. 10-13: perform the ping-pong beamforming process using a first transmission protocol to exchange messages with the second device, the first transmission protocol comprises a plurality of time slots with individual time slots being dedicated to one transmission direction and having a training period followed by a data period).
Response to Arguments
On page 8 of the Applicant's remarks, the Applicant states, " The Applicant respectfully requests confirmation of the Applicant's claim for foreign priority as well as the Office's receipt of all certified copies of referenced priority documents." This application is a continuation of PCT CN2021/070605; it does not claim any priority to a foreign application. Please see Application Data Sheet filed on 07/06/2023.
Applicant's arguments filed 11/07/2025 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive. On page 11 of Applicant's remarks, Applicant states, "As detailed above, De Carvalho does not disclose the network device receives a first request message prior to sending a first signal/training sequence, wherein the first request message instructs the network device to determine a position of the first resource element. Moreover, De Carvalho does not disclose the network device sends first indication information indicating the position of the first resource element or a position of the second resource element. In view of these deficiencies, it is clear that De Carvalho does not anticipate claim 1 as amended herein. Accordingly, the Applicant requests withdrawal of the 35 U.S.C. § 102 rejection of claim 1."
Examiner respectfully disagrees, noting that Wu [0099] discloses the base station determining a resource element based on the time-frequency position on which it receives a report information from a UE, and [0074] the UE receiving feedback information from the base station. The examiner thus maintains the rejection of claim 1 based on 35 USC 103.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). 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.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to D. Little whose telephone number is (571)272-5748. The examiner can normally be reached M-Th 8-6 ET.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Nishant Divecha can be reached at 571-270-3125. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
Information regarding the status of published or unpublished applications may be obtained from Patent Center. Unpublished application information in Patent Center is available to registered users. To file and manage patent submissions in Patent Center, visit: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov. Visit https://www.uspto.gov/patents/apply/patent-center for more information about Patent Center and https://www.uspto.gov/patents/docx for information about filing in DOCX format. For additional questions, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/D LITTLE/Examiner, Art Unit 2419
/Nishant Divecha/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2419