DETAILED ACTION
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
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)(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 17-19 and 23 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being unpatentable by Nazar et al. (US 2024/0340045, “Nazar”).
Regarding claim 17, Nazar discloses a precoding matrix determination method, performed by a user equipment (UE), the method comprising:
- determining transmission pilot information P based on pilot data s (See 2510 Fig.25, network entity receives, from the WTRU, one or more Reference Signals (RSs); Fig.6, ‘v’ interference signal/channel for UL; See Fig.8, ‘uplink MIMO based on interference feedback’; See ¶.81, the WTRU may send a multi-dimensional SRS to the gNB (e.g., the dimensions may be based on the WTRU's transmit antennas and/or the WTRU's effective transmit beams (for example, in the case of an analog beam based design/operation such as for higher frequency transmission and/or for a digital beam-formed design/operation); See further ¶.83, ¶.87, and ¶.95);and
- transmitting the transmission pilot information P to a base station (See Fig.6-10, send uplink information including reference signal; See ¶.76, a plurality of UL information).
Regarding claim 18, Nazar discloses “inputting the pilot data s to a first sub-network to output the transmission pilot information P; wherein the pilot data s is pre-agreed by the base station and the UE at a same time-frequency resource (See Fig.8 and ¶.106, multiple WTRUs may be paired to transmit on the same frequency-time resources. The eNB may assign, a WTRU, some WTRUs or each of the plurality of WTRUs, a PMI to orthogonalize their UL transmission. Performance may be reduced and/or limited due to a limited resolution of the PMI; See ¶.138 for a set of transmission layers/streams).”
Regarding claim 19, Nazar discloses “wherein the method comprises at least one of: the first sub-network is a fully connected structures, and the first sub-network comprises P layers of fully connected layers, wherein P is a positive integer; wherein a dimension of a t-th fully connected layer of the first sub-network is q.sub.t×1, wherein q.sub.t is a positive integer, and q.sub.t+1<q.sub.t; or receiving network parameters sent by the base station, and adjusting the first sub-network based on the network parameters sent by the base station (See ¶.138, a number of precoding vectors in the codebook. A set of precoding vectors for transmission layers (e.g., each transmission layer and/or each transmission stream) may be used, configured, predefined, and/or predetermined, as a codebook. The precoding vectors (e.g., each precoding vector) in the codebook may be associated with an index. A precoding vector, a precoding matrix, a precoding weight, a precoder, a codeword, a beamforming vector, and a beam index may be interchangeably used but still consistent with this disclosure. For example, a transmit signal y at a WTRU transmitter may be expressed as y=W.sub.cx, where W.sub.c may be a precoding vector and x may be a data symbol vector. A codebook may be defined as W.sub.cϵ{W.sub.c.sup.1, W.sub.c.sup.2, . . . , W.sub.c.sup.N}, where N may be a number of precoding vectors in the codebook).”
Regarding claim 23, it is a user equipment claim corresponding to the method claim 17, except the limitations “a transceiver, a memory, and a processor (See Fig.2)” and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claim.
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, 4, and 24 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nazar in view of Kwon et al. (US 9,509,381, “Kwon”).
Regarding claim 1, Nazar discloses a precoding matrix determination method, performed by a base station, the method comprising:
- receiving reception pilot information T from a user equipment (UE) (See 2510 Fig.25, network entity receives, from the WTRU, one or more Reference Signals (RSs); Fig.6, ‘v’ interference signal/channel for UL; See ¶.75, methods may use such as UL multi-user (MU)-MIMO based on interference feedback (e.g., such as (i) single spatial stream transmission and a single codebook, (ii) multi-spatial-stream transmission with a single codebook; UL MU-MIMO based on Precoded Sounding Reference Signals (SRSs); See ¶.78, a base station (BS) may acquire channel information through a UL sounding reference signal transmission and may apply the channel information for precoding (e.g., beamforming) DL data and/or control transmissions);
- determining a pilot vector T2 based on the reception pilot information T (See 2520 Fig.25, the NE estimate a channel based on the received one or more RSs; See ¶.91-94, the beamformed signal to be sent to the network from one WTRU may be denoted by Equation 1 as follows: y = W1W2x, where W1 is the first beamforming matrix, W2 is the second beamforming matrix, and x is the transmit data symbol vector from the WTRU. To reduce the control overhead (e.g., the appropriate and/or the required control overhead), the derivation mechanism and selection process of W1 and W2 may be split into two parts, as a WTRU-directed part and an eNB-directed part, respectively. W2: eNB driven, where: the eNB driven beamformer W2 may enable short term corrections);
- determining a channel matrix H based on the pilot vector T2 (See Fig.9, eNB receives receiving channel matrix H1 and/or H2 and analyze interference, etc.; See ¶.76, an eNB overrides a WTRU autonomous UL precoding determination; See ¶.114, the eNB may determine the column i of the column space H2W2 with the largest norm).
Nazar does not explicitly disclose what Kwon discloses,
- determining a conversion matrix Hp based on the channel matrix H (Kwon, See col.5, lns.53-57, an interference channel is equalized by an equalizer. Linear detection (e.g., MMSE) may be used to convert the received signal to be invariant of the instantaneous channel matrix H1).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to apply the method of “determining a conversion matrix Hp based on the channel matrix H” as taught by Kwon into the system of Nazar, so that it provides a way for the noise vector to be changed to Ŵ and {circumflex over (n)}, respectively, to compensate for the effect of linear detection (Kwon, See col.4, lns.52-54).
Nazar further discloses,
- determining a precoding matrix W corresponding to the channel matrix H based on the conversion matrix Hp (See ¶.102, eNB may determine Precoding Matrix (PM) Information based on the interference channel v; See ¶.244, the NE may send the indication in a precoding matrix index (PMI)).
Regarding claim 4, Nazar discloses “determining the channel matrix H based on the pilot vector T2 comprises: inputting the pilot vector T2 into a second sub-network to generate the channel matrix H (See ¶.138, a set of precoding vectors for transmission layers (e.g., each transmission layer and/or each transmission stream) may be used, configured, predefined, and/or predetermined, as a codebook. The precoding vectors (e.g., each precoding vector) in the codebook may be associated with an index. A precoding vector, a precoding matrix, a precoding weight, a precoder, a codeword, a beamforming vector, and a beam index may be interchangeably used but still consistent with this disclosure. For example, a transmit signal y at a WTRU transmitter may be expressed as y=W.sub.cx, where W.sub.c may be a precoding vector and x may be a data symbol vector. A codebook may be defined as W.sub.cϵ{W.sub.c.sup.1, W.sub.c.sup.2, . . . , W.sub.c.sup.N}, where N may be a number of precoding vectors in the codebook).”
Regarding claim 24, it is a base station claim corresponding to the method claim 1, except the limitations “a transceiver, a memory, and a processor (See Fig.2)” and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claim.
Claims 2 and 3 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nazar in view of Kwon and further in view of Liu et al. (US 2019/0013971, “Liu”).
Regarding claim 2, Nazar discloses “the reception pilot information T is obtained by transmission pilot information P via channel interference when transmitted to the base station, and the transmission pilot information P is obtained by processing pilot data s by a first sub-network at the UE (Nazar, See Fig.8, ‘uplink MIMO based on interference feedback’; See ¶.81, the WTRU may send a multi-dimensional SRS to the gNB (e.g., the dimensions may be based on the WTRU's transmit antennas and/or the WTRU's effective transmit beams (for example, in the case of an analog beam based design/operation such as for higher frequency transmission and/or for a digital beam-formed design/operation); See Fig.6, eNB1 determines PMI based on v and sent it to UE; See ¶.78, a base station (BS) may acquire channel information through a UL sounding reference signal transmission and may apply the channel information for precoding (e.g., beamforming) DL data and/or control transmissions; See further ¶.83, ¶.87, and ¶.95),”
but Nazar and Kwon do not explicitly discloses what Liu discloses “or determining the pilot vector T2 based on the reception pilot information T comprising: T2=[Re(T), Im(T); Re(s), Im(s); Pu]; wherein Re() represents taking a real part, and Im() represents taking an imaginary part; Pu represents an uplink signal-to-noise ratio (Liu, See Fig.6 and ¶.89, complex number comprising a real part and a imaginary part considering noise; See ¶.86, channel noise/interference
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Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to apply the method of “determining the pilot vector T2 based on the reception pilot information T comprising: T2=[Re(T), Im(T); Re(s), Im(s); Pu]; wherein Re() represents taking a real part, and Im() represents taking an imaginary part; Pu represents an uplink signal-to-noise ratio” as taught by Liu into the system of Nazar and Kwon, so that it provides a way of indicating a channel gain that is expressed with a complex number (Liu, See ¶.89) in a received signal for MIMO system (Liu, See ¶.87).
Regarding claim 3, Nazar discloses “the pilot data s is pre-agreed by the base station and the UE at a same time-frequency resource (See Fig.8 and ¶.106, multiple WTRUs may be paired to transmit on the same frequency-time resources. The eNB may assign, a WTRU, some WTRUs or each of the plurality of WTRUs, a PMI to orthogonalize their UL transmission. Performance may be reduced and/or limited due to a limited resolution of the PMI; See ¶.138 for a set of transmission layers/streams).”
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 5 and 7-16 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.
Contact Information
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Jung H Park whose telephone number is 571-272-8565. The examiner can normally be reached M-F: 7:00 AM-3:00 PM.
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/JUNG H PARK/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2411