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, 3-12, and 25-32 responded on May 27 2026 are pending, claims 1, 5, 6, 29 and 30 are amended, and claims 4, 11, 12 and 28 are canceled.
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and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114.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 June 18 2026 has been entered.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments with respect to claim(s) 1 have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
Claim Objections
Claim 1 is objected to because of the following informalities:
Claim 1 recites "first signaling or second signaling" in line 5, should read "first signaling and second signaling" because both signaling serve its purpose in the claim unless applicant intents to treat steps related to first signaling and second signaling as design option.
Claim 1 recite. Appropriate correction is required.
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, 5-10, 25-27, and 29-32 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Li et al. (US 12,166,608 B2, hereinafter "Li") in view of Lee et al. (US 2016/0344487 A1, hereinafter "Lee") .
Regarding claim 1, Lee discloses an interference mitigation (IM) method, applied to a user equipment (UE), comprising: in case that long term evolution (LTE) cell-specific reference signal (CRS) IM signaling is received, determining that an interference caused by an LTE CRS from a neighboring cell exists, wherein the LTE CRS IM signaling comprises first signaling or second signaling (Li, Col. 6 line 8-10 In this case, interference impact of an LTE cell reference signal (cell reference signal, CRS) of an LTE cell in the relatively overloaded state on an NR cell), the first signaling is transmitted from a base station to notify the NR UE that the interference caused by the LTE CRS from the neighboring cell exists (Li, Col. 7 line 20-25 a base station corresponding to an NR cell obtains CRS network configuration information of at least one neighboring LTE cell; target user equipment that receives a strong interference signal from the at least one neighboring LTE cell puts the anti-interference pattern into effect, to reduce signal interference from the neighboring LTE cell), and the second signaling is used to indicate parameters required for performing LTE CRS-IM (Li, Col. 7 line 17-19 sends the comb anti-interference configuration information to the target user equipment in the NR cell);
in case that the interference caused by the LTE CRS from the neighboring cell exists, determining whether the UE is able to perform LTE CRS-IM based on whether the NR UE has a capability for LTE CRS-IM (Li, Col. 8 line 63-67 The base station determines, based on a capability of target user equipment, that the comb anti-interference pattern is a comb anti-interference pattern that periodically takes effect); and
in case that the UE has the capability for LTE CRS-IM, performing LTE CRS-IM (Li, Col. 10 line 17-20 in the comb anti-interference configuration information for user equipment, additional pilot information for improving a demodulation capability of the user equipment);
wherein the performing LTE CRS-IM comprises:
obtaining parameters required for performing LTE CRS-IM (Li, Col. 7 line 13-16 The base station corresponding to the NR cell configures comb anti-interference configuration information for target user equipment in the NR cell based on the CRS network configuration information);
reconstructing, based on the parameters required for performing LTE CRS-IM,
CRS antenna port signal for each CRS antenna port (Li, Col. 7 line 3-5 Comb anti-interference information is configured for all the user equipment in a coverage area of the NR cell, and the comb anti-interference information includes a comb anti-interference pattern); and
cancelling an interference caused by each CRS antenna port signal
(Li, Col. 3 line 17-36 Target user equipment receives anti-interference configuration information sent by a base station corresponding to a new radio NR cell, where the anti-interference configuration information includes an anti-interference pattern, the anti-interference pattern includes a plurality of strip areas, the strip area indicates all frequency areas at a specified time domain position, the plurality of strip areas include at least one first area and at least one second area that are distributed in spacing, the first area is used to carry a service signal of the NR cell, the second area is used to carry an interference signal of at least one LTE cell, and the anti-interference configuration information is used by the target user equipment to select the at least one first area to carry the service signal of the NR cell).
Li does not explicitly disclose a received physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) based on a time domain position and a frequency domain position of each CRS antenna port and the CRS antenna port signal.
Lee from the same field of endeavor discloses cancelling an interference caused by each CRS antenna port signal from a received physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) based on a time domain position and a frequency domain position of each CRS antenna port and the CRS antenna port signal (Lee, [0150, 0158] The UE may receive the downlink signal scheduled for itself by performing an interference cancellation operation (that is, NAICS or in more detail, SLIC) at PDSCH REs; which is measured for a specific frequency/time, is same to or greater than a certain threshold and it is favorably determined that the UE performs SLIC at the time when CQI is calculated).
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 interference introduced by neighbor LTE cell disclosed by Li and cancelling interference at PDSCH disclosed by Lee with a motivation to make this modification in order to improve system throughput improvement reflecting interference cancellation performance (Lee, [0020]).
Regarding claim 3, Li discloses wherein the first signaling comprises one or more of the followings: radio resource control (RRC) signaling, medium access control-control element (MAC-CE) signaling and downlink control information (DCI) signaling (Li, Col.9 line 49-51 the comb anti-interference configuration information may include an information element RateMatchPattern of RRC signaling); the second signaling comprises RRC signaling (Li, Col. 10 line 29-31 the NR cell configures an LTE CRS RateMatch indication in the comb anti-interference configuration information by using the RRC standard signaling).
Regarding claim 5, Li discloses obtaining, by using blind detection, the
parameters required for performing LTE CRS-IM from an LTE broadcast signal from the neighboring cell (not given patentable weight due to not selected option); or
obtaining the parameters required for performing LTE CRS-IM from lte-CRS-PatternList1 and/or lte-CRS-PatternList2 in ServingCellConfig signaling (not given patentable weight due to not selected option); or
obtaining the parameters for LTE CRS-IM from the LTE CRS-IM signaling (Li, Col. 7 line17-20 sends the comb anti-interference configuration information to the target user equipment in the NR cell, where the comb anti-interference configuration information includes a comb anti-interference pattern).
Regarding claim 6, Li discloses wherein the parameters required for performing LTE CRS-IM comprise one or more of the followings: an LTE downlink carrier bandwidth, an LTE carrier center frequency, a physical cell ID of a neighboring interfering cell, a number of CRS antenna ports, a multicast/broadcast single frequency network (MBSFN) configuration, a v-shift (Li, Col. 7 line 43-45 where the network configuration information includes a quantity of network ports of the at least one LTE cell).
Regarding claim 7, Li does not explicitly disclose wherein after the performing LTE CRS-IM, the method further comprises: receiving a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH).
Lee from the same field of endeavor discloses wherein after the performing LTE CRS-IM, the method further comprises: receiving a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) (Lee, [0121] The serving cell transmits the PDSCH of the corresponding RB at the subframe where the enhanced CSI-IM resource is configured).
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 interference introduced by neighbor LTE cell disclosed by Li and cancelling interference at PDSCH disclosed by Lee with a motivation to make this modification in order to improve system throughput improvement reflecting interference cancellation performance (Lee, [0020]).
Regarding claim 8, Li does not explicitly disclose receiving a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) in case that the NR UE is unable to perform LTE CRS-IM.
Lee discloses receiving a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) in case that the NR UE is unable to perform LTE CRS-IM (Lee, [0131] the serving cell does not schedule the subframe having an enhanced CSI-IM resource to a pre-release-10 UE having no SLIC capability).
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 interference introduced by neighbor LTE cell disclosed by Li and cancelling interference at PDSCH disclosed by Lee with a motivation to make this modification in order to improve system throughput improvement reflecting interference cancellation performance (Lee, [0020]).
Regarding claim 9, Li does not explicitly disclose receiving a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) in case that the interference caused by the LTE CRS from the neighboring cell does not exist.
Lee discloses receiving a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) in case that the interference caused by the LTE CRS from the neighboring cell does not exist (Lee, [0121] The serving cell transmits the PDSCH of the corresponding RB at the subframe where the enhanced CSI-IM resource is configured).
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 interference introduced by neighbor LTE cell disclosed by Li and cancelling interference at PDSCH disclosed by Lee with a motivation to make this modification in order to improve system throughput improvement reflecting interference cancellation performance (Lee, [0020]).
Regarding claim 10, Li discloses reporting to a base station that whether the NR UE has the capability for LTE CRS-IM (Li, Col. 8 line 65-67 The base station determines, based on a capability of target user equipment, that the comb anti-interference pattern is a comb anti-interference pattern that periodically takes effect).
Regarding claims 25-27 and 30-32, these claims recite "an electronic device" and "a processor readable storage medium", that disclose similar steps as recited by the method of claims 1, 3 and 5-8, thus are rejected with the same rationale applied against claims 1, 3 and 5-8 as presented above.
Conclusion
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/LUNA WEISSBERGER/Examiner, Art Unit 2415
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