DETAILED ACTION
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDSs) submitted on 12/07/2023 and 5/24/2024 have been entered and considered by the examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
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 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 the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 11, 13-14, 16, and 18-19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Noh et al (US2020/0244288 A1).
Regarding claims 11 and 16, Noh teaches a method/receiving node performed by a receiving node in a wireless communication system (Abstract), the method comprising:
a transceiver; and a controller coupled with the transceiver and configured to (Para. 0409):
receiving, from a transmitting node, a codeword comprising a plurality of information bits and a plurality of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) bits, wherein the plurality of the information bits and the plurality of the CRC bits are interleaved based on an interleaving pattern, and wherein the interleaving pattern corresponding to a matrix is generated based on a size of the plurality of the information bits and a size of the plurality of the CRC bits (Paras. 0010-0013 and 0065; receiving device for receiving information in a wireless communication system. The receiving device may include: a transceiver configured to receive, from a transmitting device, K+J bits encoded based on a polar code, where K is the number of information bits and J is the number of CRC bits; and a polar decoder configured to decode the K+J bits based on the polar code according to an interleaving pattern. The interleaving pattern may be based on a seed value for permuting the J CRC bits, and the seed value may be predetermined based on K); and
decoding, based on the interleaving pattern, the plurality of the CRC bits included in the received codeword and interleaved (Paras. 0010-0013 and 0065; The receiving side demodulates a received signal and decodes the error correction code to thereby recover the information transmitted by the transmitting side. In this decoding procedure, errors in the received signal caused by a channel are corrected).
Regarding claims 13 and 18, Noh teaches the limitations of the previous claims. Noh further teaches wherein the plurality of the CRC bits is decoded using a search tree scheme, and wherein a tree in the search tree scheme comprises a plurality of nodes (Fig. 7; Paras. 0110-0111; i.e. Fig. 7 shows a decoding path tree with a plurality of nodes).
Regarding claims 14 and 19, Noh teaches the limitations of the previous claims. Noh further teaches wherein decoding the plurality of the CRC bits comprises: decoding a first CRC bit among the plurality of the CRC bits; in case that a CRC result is identified as a successful result in response to decoding the first CRC bit, decoding bits arranged after the first CRC bit among bits included in the received codeword; and in case that the CRC result of the first CRC bit is identified as a failure result, decoding bits arranged before the first CRC bit among the bits included in the received codeword (Fig. 10b; Para. 0129; In this case, if CRC-CHECK for all the L candidate information bit sequences fails, the decoder may declare an error and stop the decoding. That is, when the distributed CRC is used, early termination of decoding is enabled during the CAL decoding process; i.e. if the first CRC check is successful, decoding continues on with the rest of the information bits).
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 1-10, 12, and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Noh et al (US2020/0244288 A1) in view of Yao et al (US 2022/0377703 A1).
Regarding claims 1 and 6, Noh teaches a method/transmitting node performed by a transmitting node in a wireless communication system (Abstract), the method comprising:
a transceiver; and a controller coupled with the transceiver and configured to (Para. 0409):
encoding, based on a plurality of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) bits, a plurality of information bits (Paras. 0010-0013 and 0065; transmitting device may include: a CRC encoder configured to generate K+J bits by adding J CRC bits to K information bits); and
interleaving, based on an interleaving pattern, the plurality of the information bits and the plurality of the CRC bits, the interleaving pattern corresponding to a matrix generated based on a size of the plurality of the information bits and a size of the plurality of the CRC bits (Paras. 0010-0013 and 0065; an interleaver configured to interleave the K+J bits according to an interleaving pattern based on a seed value for permuting the J CRC bits; a polar encoder configured to encode the interleaved bits based on a polar code; and a transceiver configured to transmit the encoded bits to a receiving device. The seed value may be predetermined based on K); and
generating a codeword by performing a polar-encoding on the plurality of the interleaved information bits and the plurality of the interleaved CRC bits (Paras. 0010-0013 and 0065; a polar encoder configured to encode the interleaved bits based on a polar code); and
transmitting the codeword to a receiving node (Paras. 0010-0013 and 0065; a transceiver configured to transmit the encoded bits to a receiving device).
However, while Noh teaches polar encoding and convolution encoding but not both at the same time (Paras. 0011 and 0072), he does not specifically disclose generating a codeword by performing a convolution-encoding and a polar-encoding.
Yao teaches a frequency resource reservation in sidelink control information (Abstract). He further teaches generating a codeword by performing a convolution-encoding and a polar-encoding (Para. 0077; generating a set of associated bits that encode the content of the signal or message, coding (e.g., which can include adding a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and/or coding via one or more of turbo code, low density parity-check (LDPC) code, tail-biting convolution code (TBCC), polar code, etc.); i.e. coding via one or more of convolution code and polar code would read on doing both.).
Therefore, it would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to utilize the teachings as in Yao with the teachings as in Noh. The motivation for doing so would have been to provide an efficient way to reserve resources for sidelink communication by minimizing errors (Yao at para. 0075).
Regarding claims 2 and 7, the combination of references Noh and Yao teach the limitations of the previous claims. Noh further teaches wherein the matrix is generated by permuting columns of a specific matrix comprising an identity matrix and a parity matrix, and wherein the permuting of the columns comprises: identifying a first column satisfying a first condition among columns of the parity matrix, and generating a parity check relationship (PCR) set by sequentially determining, based on a second condition, one or more columns starting from the first column (Paras. 0095, 0133, and 0139-0143; Herein, N=2n, n≥1, F⊗n=F⊗F⊗(n−1), and F⊗0=1. BN is a permutation matrix known as a bit-reversal operation and BN=RN(I2⊗BN/2) and may be recursively computed. I2 is a 2-dimensional identity matrix and this recursion is initialized to B2=I2. RN is a bit-reversal interleaver and is used to map an input sN 1={s1, . . . sN} to an output xN 1={s1, s3, . . . , sN-1, s2, . . . , sN}).
Regarding claims 3 and 8, the combination of references Noh and Yao teach the limitations of the previous claims. Noh further wherein the first condition comprises at least one of a minimum hamming weight, a maximum hamming weight, a lowest column index, or an arbitrary criterion, and wherein the second condition comprises at least one of a maximum inner product, a minimum inner product, or an arbitrary criterion (Paras. 0095, 0133, and 0139-0143; Herein, N=2n, n≥1, F⊗n=F⊗F⊗(n−1), and F⊗0=1. BN is a permutation matrix known as a bit-reversal operation and BN=RN(I2⊗BN/2) and may be recursively computed. I2 is a 2-dimensional identity matrix and this recursion is initialized to B2=I2. RN is a bit-reversal interleaver and is used to map an input sN 1={s1, . . . sN} to an output xN 1={s1, s3, . . . , sN-1, s2, . . . , sN}).
Regarding claims 4 and 9, the combination of references Noh and Yao teach the limitations of the previous claims. Noh further teaches further comprising: identifying a first interleaving pattern based on first parity components in the first column among the columns of the parity matrix, wherein the first interleaving pattern indicates a first arrangement order of the plurality of the information bits and the plurality of the CRC bits; identifying a second column comprising second parity components that satisfy the second condition with the first parity components of the first column; and determining a second interleaving pattern based on the second parity components of the second column, wherein the second interleaving pattern comprises the first interleaving pattern, and wherein the plurality of the information bits and the plurality of the CRC bits are interleaved based on a second arrangement order indicated by the second interleaving pattern (Paras. 0010-0013, 0065, and 0132-0136; Int patterns are obtained by inputting candidate seed values to a bit interleaver algorithm according to the present disclosure, and among the obtained Int patterns, an optimal seed value(s) that generates an Int pattern(s) with the best performance is calculated. In this case, a seed value that generates an interleaving pattern having good performance in terms of early termination of CAL decoding using distributed CRC may be selected as the optimal seed value. For example, according to the present disclosure, a seed value that minimizes the sum of position indices of a predetermined number of parity bits in an interleaver pattern (a pattern consisting of the indices of interleaved bits), that is, places the predetermined number of parity bits at the front side of the interleaver pattern may be determined as the optimal seed value. Input parameters of the bit interleaver algorithm, candidate seed values, and output values thereof may be represented as follows).
Regarding claims 5 and 10, the combination of references Noh and Yao teach the limitations of the previous claims. Noh further teaches further comprising: identifying columns corresponding to the plurality of the CRC bits among the plurality of the columns of the matrix; identifying first PCR sets comprising information on parity components included in the columns corresponding to the plurality of the CRC bits and information on an arrangement order of the columns corresponding to the plurality of the CRC bits; identifying, based on the first PCR sets, second PCR sets comprising information on an arrangement order of the plurality of the information bits and information on an arrangement order of the plurality of the CRC bits interleaved; and identifying, based on the second PCR sets, third PCR sets comprising information on an arrangement order of the plurality of the information bits and information on an arrangement order of the plurality of the CRC bits rate-profiled (Paras. 0010-0013, 0065, 0095, and 0132-0143; Int patterns are obtained by inputting candidate seed values to a bit interleaver algorithm according to the present disclosure, and among the obtained Int patterns, an optimal seed value(s) that generates an Int pattern(s) with the best performance is calculated. In this case, a seed value that generates an interleaving pattern having good performance in terms of early termination of CAL decoding using distributed CRC may be selected as the optimal seed value. For example, according to the present disclosure, a seed value that minimizes the sum of position indices of a predetermined number of parity bits in an interleaver pattern (a pattern consisting of the indices of interleaved bits), that is, places the predetermined number of parity bits at the front side of the interleaver pattern may be determined as the optimal seed value. Input parameters of the bit interleaver algorithm, candidate seed values, and output values thereof may be represented as follows).
Regarding claims 12 and 17, Noh teaches the limitations of the previous claims. Noh further teaches wherein the codeword is generated by a convolution-encoding or a polar-encoding on the plurality of the interleaved information bits and the plurality of the interleaved CRC bits (Paras. 0010-0013, 0065, and 0072; a polar encoder configured to encode the interleaved bits based on a polar code).
However, while Noh teaches polar encoding and convolution encoding but not both at the same time (Paras. 0011 and 0072), he does not specifically disclose wherein the codeword is generated by a convolution-encoding and a polar-encoding.
Yao teaches a frequency resource reservation in sidelink control information (Abstract). He further teaches wherein the codeword is generated by a convolution-encoding and a polar-encoding (Para. 0077; generating a set of associated bits that encode the content of the signal or message, coding (e.g., which can include adding a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and/or coding via one or more of turbo code, low density parity-check (LDPC) code, tail-biting convolution code (TBCC), polar code, etc.); i.e. coding via one or more of convolution code and polar code would read on doing both.).
Therefore, it would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to utilize the teachings as in Yao with the teachings as in Noh. The motivation for doing so would have been to provide an efficient way to reserve resources for sidelink communication by minimizing errors (Yao at para. 0075).
Claims 15 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Noh et al (US2020/0244288 A1) in view of Luo et al (US 2022/0303051 A1) IDS submitted by Applicant.
Regarding claims 15 and 20, Noh teaches the limitations of the previous claims. Noh further teaches decoding the plurality of the information bits, wherein decoding the plurality of the information bits comprises (Paras. 0010-0013 and 0065; a polar decoder configured to decode the K+J bits based on the polar code according to an interleaving pattern).
However, while Noh teaches ordering reliabilities in ascending or descending order, which would suggest comparing them to threshold values (Paras. 0104, 0117, and 0121-0125), he does not specifically disclose comparing a first reliability of a first information bit with a first threshold value, and in case that the first reliability is higher than the first threshold value, comparing a second reliability of a second information bit with a second threshold value, and wherein the second threshold value is higher than the first threshold value.
Luo teaches a method for coding in a wireless communication network (Abstract). He further teaches comparing a first reliability of a first information bit with a first threshold value, and in case that the first reliability is higher than the first threshold value, comparing a second reliability of a second information bit with a second threshold value, and wherein the second threshold value is higher than the first threshold value (Paras. 0151 and 0192-0204; in an embodiment, the M low-reliability information bits include M information bits whose reliability is less than a preset threshold, or the M low-reliability information bits include M lowest-reliability information bits in the K information bits).
Therefore, it would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to utilize the teachings as in Luo with the teachings as in Noh. The motivation for doing so would have been to allow reliability of broadcast signaling transmission to be improved (Luo at para. 0195).
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to KENT KRUEGER whose telephone number is (303)297-4238. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F 8:00-5:00 MT.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Michael Thier can be reached on (571) 272-2832. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/KENT KRUEGER/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2474