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 .
The Examiner thanks the Applicant for the well-prepared amendment. The Examiner appreciates the Applicant’s effort to carefully analyze the Office action, and make appropriate arguments and amendments.
Status of Claims
Claims 1-15 filed on December 31, 2025 are pending, claims 1 and 11 are amended.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on February 18, 2026 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statements are being considered by the examiner and an initialed and dated copy of the Applicant’s IDS form 1449 is attached to the instant Office Action.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments, see pg. 9, filed December 31, 2025, with respect to claims 1-5 have been fully considered and are persuasive. The rejections under 35 U.S.C. § 112 (b) of claims 1-5 has been withdrawn.
Applicant's arguments filed, see pg. 10-11, filed December 31, 2025, have been fully considered but they are not persuasive. Applicant particularly acknowledges that Gan discloses EHT-LTFs are allocated to the same subcarriers as the data, which are contiguous or non-contiguous Rus (i.e. one RU noncontiguous to another RU). Gan further discloses in Fig. 6 first STA RU 1 uses an MCS 6 and in [0012] if a value of an MCS field in the station information field is an MCS used when the RU carries data. Applicant also argue Gan only include multiple Rus that are allocated to the same station. However, claim does not positively recite one station only allow one RU and in Fig. 6, fourth STA only use RU 8. Without additional limitation recited in claims 4-5, there are numerous ways to reconstruct the frame.
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.
Claim(s) 1-3, 6-8 and 11-13 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gan et al.(US 2021/0135779 A1, WO 2020015650A published on Jan. 23 2020, hereinafter "Gan") in view of Son et al. (US 10,687,281 B2, hereinafter "Son").
Regarding claim 1, Gan discloses a method for transmitting an uplink physical layer protocol data unit (PPDU), comprising:
receiving, by a station (STA) of one of more STAs, a trigger frame from an access point (AP), wherein the trigger frame is usable to trigger the STA to transmit the uplink PPDU (Gan, [0032] A first station STA receives a trigger frame sent by an access point AP, where the trigger frame includes P station information fields, each of the P station information fields corresponds to one resource unit RU allocated to the first station STA, the P station information fields are consecutively arranged, and P is a positive integer greater than 1; and the first STA sends data information (i.e. uplink PPDU) based on the P allocated RUs); and
sending, by the STA, the uplink PPDU to the AP based on the trigger frame (Gan, [0033] an uplink data transmission scenario, the AP may allocate P RUs (where P is a positive integer greater than or equal to 1) to the first STA, and indicate the P RUs to the first STA through the P station information fields in the trigger frame), wherein the uplink PPDU comprises a data field and long training fields (LTFs) usable for channel estimation, the data field is carried on a distributed resource unit (RU), the distributed RU comprises a plurality of subcarrier groups that are distributed in frequency domain, one subcarrier group of the plurality of subcarrier groups comprises: one subcarrier, or at least two continuous subcarriers (Gan, [0186] two L-LTFs of L-preamble fields transmitted in the first 20 MHz bandwidth and the second 20 MHz bandwidth may provide 104 channel estimation subcarriers…the inserting two channel estimation subcarriers specifically refers to inserting two channel estimation subcarriers into a first EHT signaling field transmitted in two 20 MHz bandwidths corresponding to every 40 MHz bandwidth of the transmission bandwidth also see Fig. 6 fourth STA use RU8 (i.e. one RU)),
Gan does not explicitly disclose the LTFs are carried on all of the plurality of subcarriers in a first transmission bandwidth, and the first transmission bandwidth corresponds to the distributed RU allocated by the AP to the at least one STA for transmitting the uplink PPDU.
Son from the same field of endeavor discloses the LTFs are carried on all of the plurality of subcarriers in a first transmission bandwidth, and the first transmission bandwidth corresponds to the distributed RU allocated by the AP to the at least one STA for transmitting the uplink PPDU (Son, Col. 17 line 11-15 the AP may indicate partition information of the 20 MHz band via HE-SIG-B of the PPDU, and use some resource units including at least two of the partitioned resource units for the narrowband transmission; FIG. 12(a) the HELTFs are allocated to the same subcarriers as the data, allocated to noncontiguous RUs-same bandwidth).
It would have been obvious for one with ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified AP and STA communication disclosed by Gan and wireless communication disclosed by Son with a motivation to make this modification in order to improve channel utilization and communication speed (Son, Col. 1 line 60).
Regarding claim 2, Gan discloses obtaining, by the STA based on values of an LTF sequence of the LTFs and a matrix P, the LTFs carried on all the subcarriers, wherein a quantity of dimensions of the matrix P is based on a quantity of the one or more STAs triggered by the trigger frame, a maximum quantity of STAs supportable by a system, and a maximum number of spatial streams supportable by a single STA of the one or more STAs (Gan, [0232] A maximum quantity of streams supported by 802.11ax is still 8, and the P matrix of 802.11ac is still used. When a plurality of streams are sent, a data subcarrier, not including a pilot subcarrier, of a high-efficiency long training sequence field (high efficient long training field, HE-LTF) of a channel estimation sequence in 802.11ax is point-multiplied by the P matrix. However, single-user transmission in a next-generation EHT protocol in 802.11ax uses more streams, up to 16 streams. The present invention proposes a new P-matrix design applicable to more than eight streams).
Regarding claim 3, Gan discloses wherein the obtaining the LTFs carried on all the subcarriers comprises:
determining, by the STA, a corresponding row from the matrix P based on an order of the STA in the one or more STAs (Gan, [0032, 0231] the first STA sends data information (i.e. uplink PPDU) based on the P allocated RUs); and obtaining, by the STA based on the corresponding row the values of the LTF sequence, the LTFs carried on all the subcarriers (Gan, [0184] The M channel estimation subcarriers (i.e. LTFs) carry a specified value or a specified bit sequence that is known to the first STA).
Regarding claims 6-8 and 11-13, these claims recite "a chip" and "a communication apparatus" that disclose similar steps as recited by the method of claims 1-3, thus are rejected with the same rationale applied against claims 1-3 as presented above.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 4-5, 9-10 and 14-15 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.
Claims 4, 9 and are potentially allowable over the prior art of record Gan et al.(US 2021/0135779 A1, WO 2020015650A published on Jan. 23 2020, hereinafter "Gan") in view of Son et al. (US 10,687,281 B2, hereinafter "Son") and further in view of Chun et al. (US 10,785,772 B2, hereinafter "Chun") as applied to the claim above. Claims 5, 10 and 15 defines TF, TL and TC in Fig 11(a). it can obtain wherein i satisfies: i = (TF-TL)/Tc+1, wherein TF is a duration from reception of the trigger frame by the STA to reception of a user information field corresponding to the STA,TL is a duration from the reception of the trigger frame by the STA to reception of a first user information field in the trigger frame, and Tc is a length of the user information field corresponding to the STA.
Gan in view of Son does not explicitly disclose Xk=Pi x LTFk, Pi is first Si rows into ixNmsth, rows in the matrix P, Nu is the quantity of the STAs triggered by the trigger frame, Nmu is the maximum quantity of the STAs supportable by the system, Nms is the maximum number of the spatial streams supportable by the single STA and F is a first row in the matrix P.
Chun discloses Xk=Pi x LTFk, Pi is first Si rows into ixNmsth, rows in the matrix P , Nu is the quantity of the STAs triggered by the trigger frame, Nmu is the maximum quantity of the STAs supportable by the system, Nms is the maximum number of the spatial streams supportable by the single STA and F is a first row in the matrix P (Chun, Col. 37, line 16-21; Col. 40 line 1-3; Col.64, line 50-67 the maximum number of paired STA may be 4 and when the maximum of time-space streams is 8 (i.e. Nms), a maximum of 4 time-space streams may be allocated to each STA (i.e. Nmu); the UL MU trigger frame 3110 may include control information including STA identifier (ID)/address information, resource allocation information to be used by each STA, duration information (i.e. Nu) also refer to Fig. 31; both the STA 1 and the STA 2 may map the same HE-LTF sequence within the 106 tones of allocated resource unit region and transmit the same. In this case, the number of HE-LTF symbols may be determined according to the number of streams regarding the corresponding 106 tones of resource unit, and a sequence (e.g., one row of a P matrix) orthogonal to a time axis may be multiplied to the HE-LTF symbols).
Gan in view of Son fails to teach alone or in combination "wherein an LTF Xk of the LTFs carried on a kth subcarrier in all the subcarriers and an LTF Xd of the LTFs carried on a dth subcarrier in all the subcarriers respectively satisfy: Xd=FxLTFd, wherein the kth, subcarrier is a data subcarrier, the dth subcarrier is a pilot subcarrier, the(i-1)xNmsx1th to ixNmsth rows in the matrix P are rows that correspond to a sequence number i of an STA of the one or more STAs and that are in the matrix P, the matrix P is an NLTFXNLTF orthogonal mapping matrix, NLTF is a quantity of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols comprised in the LTFs, (NuXNms) ≤ NLTF ≤ (NmuXNms), i is the sequence number of the STA, 1 ≤i ≤Nu, Si is a number of spatial streams actually transmitted by the STA with the sequence number i, 1 ≤Si ≤Nms , LTFk is a value that corresponds to the kth subcarrier and that is of the LTF sequence, LTFd is a value that corresponds to the dth subcarrier and that is of the LTF sequence".
Conclusion
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. 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 LUNA WEISSBERGER whose telephone number is (571)272-3315. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8:00am-5:30pm.
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, Jeffrey Rutkowski can be reached at (571)270-1215. 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.
/LUNA WEISSBERGER/Examiner, Art Unit 2415