DETAILED ACTION
Status of Case
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
This Office Action is in response to the claims filed on 2/13/2024.
Claims 1-30 are pending.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) filed on 2/13/2024 has been considered by Examiner.
Claim Objections
Claim 29 is objected to because of the following informalities: the preamble recites “The apparatus of claim 26., in which…” There is a period of “26” which should be deleted. 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.
Claims 1, 7, 11, 16, 22, 26 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nammi (USPN 10,594,380) in view of Conner (USPAN 2006/0146717).
Consider claims 1 and 16, Nammi discloses a method of wireless communication by a user equipment (UE) (see figure 2, reproduced below for convenience, wherein disclosed is said method), and a corresponding apparatus for wireless communications at a user equipment (UE), comprising a processor; a memory coupled with the processor; and instructions stored in the memory and operable, when executed by the processor (see figures 2 and 9, wherein disclosed is said UE comprising said processor and memory), to cause the apparatus to:
receive, from a base station, a reference signal on a wideband channel (see col. 7 lines 31-37; figure 2: ref. sign 202);
estimate the wideband channel based on receiving the reference signal (see col. 7 lines 31-37 and col. 6 lines 30-33);
broadly construed, identify a bottleneck band of the wideband channel based on a metric associated with the estimated wideband channel (table 1 shows subband and wideband CQI, which is part of CSI, each subband CSI reporting showing a range of channel estimates, at least one of which would implicitly be the “bottleneck”);
transmit, to the base station, a channel state feedback report based on identifying the bottleneck band, the channel state feedback report indicating channel state information (CSI) associated with the estimated wideband channel (see col. 7 lines 31-37 and table 1: subband reporting instances); and
receive, from the base station, a transmission grant based on transmitting the channel state feedback report (implicit since the base station allocates transmissions to good channel quality resources).
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Although Nammi can be broadly construed to disclose identifying a bottleneck band of the channel (see above), Nammi does not explicitly disclose this.
Conner explicitly discloses identifying a bottleneck band of a channel (see paragraph 29: “Each of the rows 410 and 420 may contain a metric representing the cost associated with a path that minimizes the impact of a particular bottleneck channel. For example, the bottleneck channel may be a communication channel used by most mesh nodes of a path in the wireless mesh network 200.”; also, see paragraph 31: “In one example, the bottleneck channel row 410 may correspond to Channel 1 operating as the bottleneck channel of a path between the source node 201 and the intermediate node 204.”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Nammi and combine it with the noted teachings of Conner. The motivation to combine these references is to provide a method for identifying a distance-vector associated with a wireless mesh network, as well as providing a more efficient network route to reduce network latency (see paragraph 1 of Conner).
Consider claims 7 and 22, Nammi discloses a channel state feedback report (see col. 7 lines 31-37 and table 1: subband reporting instances), and although Nammi can be broadly construed to disclose a location of a first bottleneck band (see above), Nammi does not explicitly disclose this.
Conner explicitly discloses a location of a first bottleneck band (see paragraph 29: “Each of the rows 410 and 420 may contain a metric representing the cost associated with a path that minimizes the impact of a particular bottleneck channel. For example, the bottleneck channel may be a communication channel used by most mesh nodes of a path in the wireless mesh network 200.”; also, see paragraph 31: “In one example, the bottleneck channel row 410 may correspond to Channel 1 operating as the bottleneck channel of a path between the source node 201 and the intermediate node 204.”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Nammi and combine it with the noted teachings of Conner. The motivation to combine these references is to provide a method for identifying a distance-vector associated with a wireless mesh network, as well as providing a more efficient network route to reduce network latency (see paragraph 1 of Conner).
Consider claims 11 and 26, Nammi discloses a method of wireless communication performed by a base station (see figure 2, reproduced below for convenience, wherein disclosed is said method), and a corresponding apparatus for wireless communications at a base station, comprising: a processor; a memory coupled with the processor; and instructions stored in the memory and operable, when executed by the processor (see figures 2 and 10, wherein disclosed is said base station comprising said processor and memory), to cause the apparatus to:
transmitting, to a user equipment (UE), a reference signal on a wideband channel (see col. 7 lines 31-37; figure 2: ref. sign 202);
receiving, from the UE, a channel state feedback report channel (see col. 7 lines 31-37 and table 1: subband reporting instances) based on transmitting the reference signal, the channel state feedback report indicating, broadly construed, one or more of a location of a first bottleneck band associated with the wideband channel, a wideband channel state information (CSI) associated with the first bottleneck band, or a single respective CSI for each band, within a bandwidth, that is different than the first bottleneck band (table 1 shows subband and wideband CQI, which is part of CSI, each subband CSI reporting showing a range of channel estimates, at least one of which would implicitly be the “bottleneck”); and
transmitting, to the UE, a first transmission grant based on receiving the channel state feedback report (implicit since the base station allocates transmissions to good channel quality resources).
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Although Nammi can be broadly construed to disclose a location of a first bottleneck band (see above), Nammi does not explicitly disclose this.
Conner explicitly discloses a location of a first bottleneck band (see paragraph 29: “Each of the rows 410 and 420 may contain a metric representing the cost associated with a path that minimizes the impact of a particular bottleneck channel. For example, the bottleneck channel may be a communication channel used by most mesh nodes of a path in the wireless mesh network 200.”; also, see paragraph 31: “In one example, the bottleneck channel row 410 may correspond to Channel 1 operating as the bottleneck channel of a path between the source node 201 and the intermediate node 204.”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Nammi and combine it with the noted teachings of Conner. The motivation to combine these references is to provide a method for identifying a distance-vector associated with a wireless mesh network, as well as providing a more efficient network route to reduce network latency (see paragraph 1 of Conner).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-6, 9-10, 12-15, 17-21, 24-25, and 27-30 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.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Jamal Javaid whose telephone number is 571-270-5137 and email address is Jamal.Javaid@uspto.gov.
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/JAMAL JAVAID/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2412