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 .
DETAILED ACTION
This action is responsive to the application filed on 02/23/2024 has a total of 20 claims pending in the application; there are 2 independent claims and 18 dependent claims, all of which are ready for examination by the examiner.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-10 and 12-20 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 or amend these claims into their base claims, respectively.
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 nonobviousness.
Claims 1 and 11 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being obvious over Shellhammer et al. Publication No. (US 2023/0035113 A1) in view of Lin et al. Publication No. (US 2017/0317868 A1).
The applied reference has a common assignee with the instant application. Based upon the earlier effectively filed date of the reference, it constitutes prior art under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2). It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to have modified the pending application to include a predefined discrete resource blocks.
This rejection under 35 U.S.C. 103 might be overcome by: (1) a showing under 37 CFR 1.130(a) that the subject matter disclosed in the reference was obtained directly or indirectly from the inventor or a joint inventor of this application and is thus not prior art in accordance with 35 U.S.C.102(b)(2)(A); (2) a showing under 37 CFR 1.130(b) of a prior public disclosure under 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(B); or (3) a statement pursuant to 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) establishing that, not later than the effective filing date of the claimed invention, the subject matter disclosed and the claimed invention were either owned by the same person or subject to an obligation of assignment to the same person or subject to a joint research agreement. See generally MPEP § 717.02.
Regarding claim 1, Shellhammer teaches a trigger-based physical layer protocol data unit transmission method (FIG. 6, indicating a trigger-based physical layer protocol data unit (TB PPDU) from stations (STAs) [0066] FIG.6), comprising:
receiving, by a station (STA 104 FIG.1), a triggering frame, wherein the triggering frame comprises discrete resource unit (DRU) indication information (receiving, from an access point AP102, a trigger frame including one or more distributed RUs (dRUs) [0139] FIG.14), the DRU indication information indicates information about a DRU allocated to the station (receiving, from an access point, a trigger frame soliciting a TB PPDU from a plurality of wireless stations (STAs) via a plurality of resource units (RUs), respectively, the trigger frame carrying RU allocation information indicating the plurality of RUs including one or more distributed RUs (dRUs) and carrying tone mapping information indicating at least a first spreading bandwidth design for the one or more distributed RUs (dRUs) [0139-142] FIG.20), an operating bandwidth of the station is 20 MHz, the DRU is one or more of predefined discrete resource blocks, and an absolute value of a difference between indices of any two data subcarriers in each resource block in the predefined discrete resource blocks (the PPDU bandwidth being 20 MHz bandwidth or 40 MHz bandwidth; and signaling tones [subcarriers] mapping information in a signal field of the trigger frame carrying a value, that is the fourth value 1238 (such as “100”) [e.g., absolute value] may indicate that the RU allocation information is for dRUs associated with distributed tone mapping and that the spreading bandwidth design includes a 20 MHz spreading bandwidth [0096-99] FIG.12C);
determining, by the station, the allocated DRU based on an indication of the DRU indication information (each STA, allocated an RU in the trigger frame 1400, as a dRU, and may determine a location of a corresponding rRU (sharing the same RU identifier in the RU allocation table) in a tone plan originally designed for contiguous tone mapping [0103-107] FIG.13); and
sending, by the station, a trigger-based physical layer protocol data unit (TB PPDU) by using the DRU (the first STA identify the first dRU in the RU allocation information associated with the first spreading bandwidth [e.g., 20 MHz], then mapping the first dRU to a number (N) of noncontiguous tones spanning the first spreading bandwidth, and proceeds with transmitting the TB PPDU via the wireless channel as a distributed transmission over the N noncontiguous tones to the AP such as one of the APs 102 or 502 of FIGS. 1 and 4, respectively [0138-142] FIG.1).
Shellhammer does not explicitly teach the predefined discrete resource blocks is greater than 1.
Lin teaches the predefined discrete resource blocks that is specifically greater than 1 (Lin: a bit parsing unit, configured to allocate bits in a coded data stream to n sub resource block interleaving units according to a specific sequence, where n is a positive integer greater than 1, and a value of n is a quantity of resource blocks allocated to the user; and the sub resource block interleaving units, configured to perform discrete interleaving on input bits[0120-126] FIG.9).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to have modified Shellhammer by the teaching of Lin to specify a predefined discrete resource blocks in order to improve transmission efficiency of the multi-user system (Lin: [007-9] FIG.10).
Claims 2 to 10 (allowable subject matter) based on the specific limitations claimed for the predefined discrete resource blocks DRUs.
Regarding claim 11, related to the same limitation set for hereinabove in claim 1, where the difference used is the limitations were presented from an “apparatus” side with a processor and memory with instructions (Shellhammer: [0061-62] FIG.3) and wordings of the claim were interchanged within the claim itself or were presented as a combination of two or more previously presented limitations. This change does not affect the limitation of the above treated claims. Adding these phrases to the claim and interchanging the wording did not introduce new limitations to this claim. Therefore, this claim was rejected for similar reasons as stated above.
Claims 12 to 20 (allowable subject matter) based on the specific limitations claimed for the predefined discrete resource blocks DRUs.
Conclusion
When responding to this office action, Applicant is advised to clearly point out the patentable novelty which he or she thinks the claims present, in view of the state of the art disclosed by the references cited or the objections made. He or she must also show how the amendments avoid such references or objections See 37 CFR 1.111 (c).
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/ABDELNABI O MUSA/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2472