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 6/14/2024.
Claims 1-20 are pending.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) filed on 6/14/2024, 6/25/2024, 11/29/2024, 3/13/2025, 6/5/2025, 7/22/2025, 11/21/2025, and 3/5/2026 have been considered by Examiner.
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 and 11 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Patil (“Container for advertising ML Information”, IEEE 802.11-20/0357r5, 15 March 2020, pages 1-30, XP055901275) (cited in Applicant’s IDS filed on 3/5/2026) in view of Stacey (USPAN 2020/0221545).
Consider claims 1 and 11, Patil discloses a communication method (see slide 14, reproduced below for convenience, wherein disclosed is said method), and a corresponding communication apparatus, comprising at least one processor and a memory, wherein the memory is configured to store a computer program, and the at least one processor is configured to execute the computer program (see slide 14, wherein Examiner submits that it is inherent that an access point would comprise said processor and memory), to enable the communication apparatus to:
receive, from a reporting access point (AP) of a multi-link device (MLD), a management frame (see the reference to the “Beacon” under section “1” in slide 14), wherein the management frame comprises MLD information, wherein the MLD information comprises: information about the reporting AP (see e.g. “all information about AP that sends Beacon/Probe Response” under section “1” in slide 14), information about a reported AP of the MLD (see e.g. information related to the “Additional info” for each co-located AP, in particular if it belons to the same MLD “as reporting AP” under section “1” in slide 14), and shared information, wherein the shared information comprises a medium access control (MAC) address of the MLD (see the reference to the “MAC address” under section “1” in slide 14).
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Although Patil discloses the MDL information (see above), Patil does not specifically disclose to parse information to obtain information about the reporting AP and the information about the reported AP.
Stacey discloses to parse information to obtain information about the reporting AP and the information about the reported AP (see paragraphs 189-190 and figure 22: obtaining information about the reporting AP and the information about the reported AP).
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 Patil and combine it with the noted teachings of Stacey. The motivation to combine these references is to provide a method of efficiently using resources to provide bandwidth and acceptable response times to users in a WLAN using multi-link discovery signaling (see paragraphs 2-3 of Stacey).
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.
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
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