DETAILED ACTION
Claims 1-15 are presented for examination.
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 § 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) 1-15 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Richards (US PG Pub No. 2024/0045744 A1) in view of Naik et al. (US PG Pub No. 2023/0057887 A1).
Regarding claim 1, Richards teaches a method of coordinating allocation of radio processing operations associated with multiple [[v]]RAN nodes to shared computing resources ([0002]), the method comprising:
receiving, by a centralized Acceleration Abstraction Layer (AAL) broker implemented on top of a shared accelerating computing infrastructure ([0076], wherein management node 25 performs one or more functions with respect to mapping of AAL hardware to AAL queue assignments and/or mapping of physical layer 1 software and AAL hardware), an operation request from a
selecting, by the AAL broker using a predefined or configurable scheduling policy, a physical hardware accelerator for accelerated execution of the operation (Figs 8-9; [0081]; [0086]); and
forwarding, by the AAL broker, the operation request to a processing queue of the selected physical hardware accelerator ([0086]).
Richards does not teach the operations are virtual operations associated with vRAN nodes. Naik teaches the use of vRAN nodes instead of legacy RAN nodes ([0004], “Operators have been making efforts to streamline the network by virtualizing the radio access network (RAN) to make a Virtual Radio access network (vRAN). The virtualized RAN or Cloud-RAN runs the baseband functions as VNFs (Virtual Network Functions) at telecommunication data-centers or public data-centers. The vRAN can execute on vendor proprietary appliance base-stations OR as virtualized network function software on virtual machines hosted on standard servers in a pooled manner at a data center. In vRAN, the baseband functions run as virtual machines.”). It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to modify Richards to coordinate virtual operations associated with vRAN nodes. One would be motivated by the desire to streamline networks as taught by Naik.
Regarding claim 2, Naik teaches wherein accelerating computing infrastructure as an individual vRAN node ([0057])
Regarding claim 3, Richards teaches wherein the operation request comprises information about the operation that shall be accelerated, the data to execute the operation, and settings to execute the operation ([0123]).
Regarding claim 4, Richards does not teach performing, by the selected physical hardware accelerator, the operation in a FIFO manner considering the requests in the processing queue.
However, it is old and well known to perform received jobs in a FIFO manner. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to perform the operation in a FIFO manner considering the requests in the processing queue as doing so is a commonplace design choice.
Regarding claim 5, Richards teaches receiving, by the AAL broker, responsive to forwarding the operation request to the processing queue of the selected physical hardware accelerator, a response from the selected physical hardware accelerator; and forwarding, by the AAL broker, the response received from the selected physical hardware accelerator to the vRAN node ([0019]).
Regarding claim 6, Naik teaches the scheduling policy used by the AAL broker to select the physical hardware accelerator for accelerated execution of the operation is implemented with a machine learning ([0030]); (ML) model minimizing a cost function that combines information about network throughput and energy consumption of the shared accelerating computing infrastructure ([0058]).
Regarding claim 7, Richards teaches using a resource controller to configure the AAL broker by deploying computing policies via an O3 interface ([0003]).
Regarding claim 8, Naik teaches using a resource controller to configure radio resource policies of vRAN nodes via an E2 interface, and/or to notify changes on radio resource policies configured on vRAN nodes to Near-RT RIC via another E2 interface ([0022]; [0034];
Regarding claims 9-15, they are the system claims of claims 1-8 above. Therefore, they are rejected for the same reasons as claims 1-8 above.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ERIC C WAI whose telephone number is (571)270-1012. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday 9-5.
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/Eric C Wai/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2195
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