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 .
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 (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 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)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
(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.
Claim(s) 1 and 8 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) as being anticipated by Applicant’s submission of prior art, Alawieh et al., US Patent Application Publication Number 2022/0271982 (hereinafter Alawieh).
Regarding claims 1 and 8, Alawieh discloses a joint communication and sensing method for an orthogonal frequency domain multiplexing (OFDM) communication system, comprising: determining a staggering offset format for an OFDM reference signal (RS) symbol [paragraph 0074: “In accordance with embodiments of the inventive approach the phase offset correction is applied to OFDM symbols belonging to the same SRS resource so that the symbols may be coherently added, thereby reducing or canceling the ambiguity/aliasing of staggered reference signals after de-staggering them.”, and paragraph 0178: “For a staggered SRS resource pattern, the RE pattern of an SRS resource is configured with a comb offset value per SRS OFDM symbol that is relative to the comb offset of the first SRS OFDM symbol.”]; and eliminating a time delay ambiguity in a two-dimension (2D) range with the determined staggering offset format [paragraph 0074: “ In accordance with embodiments of the inventive approach the phase offset correction is applied to OFDM symbols belonging to the same SRS resource so that the symbols may be coherently added, thereby reducing or canceling the ambiguity/aliasing of staggered reference signals after de-staggering them.”]; wherein the OFDM RS symbol is of a comb structure [paragraphs 0084-0085: wherein the apparatus is to transmit the reference signal using a plurality of OFDM symbols, each OFDM symbol having a comb structure “].
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-7 and 9-14 are allowed. Claims 3-7 directly or indirectly depend from claim 2. Claims 10-14 directly or indirectly depend from claim 9. Prior art has not been found that suggests or renders obvious the limitations of claims 2 and 9 disclosing wherein Sₛᵤb unit in a subcarrier number denotes a spacing of a plurality of non-zero resource elements (RE) in a frequency domain, Sₛγₘ unit in a symbol number denotes the spacing of the RS symbol in the time domain, Fᵢ unit in a subcarrier numbers denotes a staggering offset in the frequency domain of an ith RS symbol, Tₛ denotes an OFDM duration, Tcₚ denotes a cyclic prefix (CP) duration, and T = Tₛ + Tcₚ denotes a sum of the OFDM symbol duration and the CP duration.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Eberlein et al., US Patent Application Publication Number 2024/0283581, disclose an apparatus and method for providing a modified OFDM frame structure.
Kumar et al., WO 2021/071581, disclose a method and apparatus for 5G positioning accuracy improvement in presence of phase noise.
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/EAW/
February 2, 2026
/ERIKA A WASHINGTON/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2644