DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
1. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Status of Claims
2. This Office Action is in response to the application filed on 08/06/2024. Claims 1 and through 20 are presently pending and are presented for examination.
3. 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 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.
Claim Objections
4. Claims 2-13 and 15-19 objected to because of the following informalities: the limitations begin with “The”. They should begin with “the”. Appropriate correction is required.
Double Patenting
5. The nonstatutory double patenting rejection is based on a judicially created doctrine grounded in public policy (a policy reflected in the statute) so as to prevent the unjustified or improper timewise extension of the “right to exclude” granted by a patent and to prevent possible harassment by multiple assignees. A nonstatutory double patenting rejection is appropriate where the conflicting claims are not identical, but at least one examined application claim is not patentably distinct from the reference claim(s) because the examined application claim is either anticipated by, or would have been obvious over, the reference claim(s). See, e.g., In re Berg, 140 F.3d 1428, 46 USPQ2d 1226 (Fed. Cir. 1998); In re Goodman, 11 F.3d 1046, 29 USPQ2d 2010 (Fed. Cir. 1993); In re Longi, 759 F.2d 887, 225 USPQ 645 (Fed. Cir. 1985); In re Van Ornum, 686 F.2d 937, 214 USPQ 761 (CCPA 1982); In re Vogel, 422 F.2d 438, 164 USPQ 619 (CCPA 1970); In re Thorington, 418 F.2d 528, 163 USPQ 644 (CCPA 1969).
A timely filed terminal disclaimer in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(c) or 1.321(d) may be used to overcome an actual or provisional rejection based on nonstatutory double patenting provided the reference application or patent either is shown to be commonly owned with the examined application, or claims an invention made as a result of activities undertaken within the scope of a joint research agreement. See MPEP § 717.02 for applications subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA as explained in MPEP § 2159. See MPEP § 2146 et seq. for applications not subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . A terminal disclaimer must be signed in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(b).
The filing of a terminal disclaimer by itself is not a complete reply to a nonstatutory double patenting (NSDP) rejection. A complete reply requires that the terminal disclaimer be accompanied by a reply requesting reconsideration of the prior Office action. Even where the NSDP rejection is provisional the reply must be complete. See MPEP § 804, subsection I.B.1. For a reply to a non-final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.111(a). For a reply to final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.113(c). A request for reconsideration while not provided for in 37 CFR 1.113(c) may be filed after final for consideration. See MPEP §§ 706.07(e) and 714.13.
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Claim 1 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 1 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the instant claim 1 has broaden claim 1 of Bansal by eliminating limitations “a cellular core network”; “a short message service center (SMSC)”; and analyze an SMS message characteristics of the SMS message” and in the limitation “determine a duration of time for which the cellular communication channel is to be kept active based on the analyzed SMS message characteristic of the SMS message”, the analysis of message characteristic of the SMS message is done by using a machine learning model where the machine learning model was absent in the claim 1 of Bansal as an analysis tool-however any other analysis tool could have been used to obtain the message characteristic of the SMS message since there is no detailed procedure disclosed to identify the novelty of the machine learning model.
Claim 1 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 13 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the instant claim 13 has broaden claim 1 of Bansal by eliminating limitations “a cellular core network”; “a short message service center (SMSC)”; “a string of characters within the SMS message”; and “a number of SMS messages sent by the UE in a defined time period”.
Claims 14 and 20 are rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 1 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because of the same reasons mentioned for claim 1 in above.
Claim 2 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 1 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because claim 2 is the same as “a cellular core network” limitation of claim 1 of Bansal.
Claim 3 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 1 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because claim 2 is the same as “a short message service center (SMSC)” limitation of claim 1 of Bansal.
Claim 6 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 2 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 6 is substantially is the same as claim 2 of Bansal.
Claim 7 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 3 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 7 is substantially is the same as claim 3 of Bansal.
Claim 8 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 4 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 8 is substantially is the same as claim 4 of Bansal.
Claim 9 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 5 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 9 is substantially is the same as claim 5 of Bansal.
Claim 19 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 5 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 19 is substantially is the same as claim 5 of Bansal.
Claim 10 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 6 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 10 is substantially is the same as claim 6 of Bansal.
Claim 11 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 7of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 11 is substantially is the same as claim 7 of Bansal.
Claim 12 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 9 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 12 is substantially is the same as claim 9 of Bansal.
Claim 17 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 9 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 17 is substantially is the same as claim 9 of Bansal.
Claim 13 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 10 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 13 is substantially is the same as claim 10 of Bansal.
Claim 18 is rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claims 6-7 of U.S. Patent No.[12,096,505 B2-hereafter Bansal]. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claim 18 is substantially is the same as claim 6-7 of Bansal.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
6. 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, 11-18, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Wells (US 2016/0105781 A1) in view of Kukreja et al. (2021/0014221 A1).
For claim 1 Wells teaches a cellular network system (Fig. 1 “network 120”) comprising:
a cellular base station in communication with a cellular core network, wherein the cellular base station (BS) communicates wirelessly using a cellular radio access technology (RAT) with user equipment (UE) (Fig. 1 “BS 170 with UE 115 with WiFi 180 network (RAT)” and Fig. 1 “cellular core network 540”), wherein the cellular BS is configured to:
establish a cellular communication channel between the UE and the cellular core network for sending a short message service (SMS) message via a short message service center (SMSC) (Fig. 1 “BS 170 establishes a connection with UE 115” and paragraph 25 “UE 115 would utilize the voice channels 175 of the cellular service 170 to conduct call sessions and the signaling channel to conduct SMS messaging”); and
a cellular network messaging controller in communication with the cellular core network (paragraph 26 "system 105 comprises other controllers"), the cellular network messaging controller configured to:
Wells does not explicitly teach determine, using a machine learning model, a duration of time for which the cellular communication channel is to be kept active based on one or more characteristics selected from the group consisting of:
a use characteristic of the UE;
a characteristic of the UE,
However, Kukreja teaches ML models may determine timeout values based on information about the individual user for whom the timeout parameter value is being determined …the idle timeout value should be determined using an ML model that employs user-specific information without using group information (Kukreja: paragraphs 7, 26, and 28). In addition, Kukreja teaches the ML model is trained on features that are extracted from user records. These features can represent a history of session-relevant user activity. For example, the ML model can be trained on information indicating what resources a particular user or user group has accessed, durations of resource access, recorded session durations, and the like (Kukreja: paragraph 7). In addition, Kukreja teaches in FIG. 4, the prediction engine 126 receives input features 410 to generate, based on applying the group ML model 210 and/or the personal ML model 230 to the input features 410, output features 412. The input features 410 may comprise attributes derived from information contained in a user record 405, where the user record 405 represents a history of activity for a specific user. Using the group ML model 210 and/or the personal ML model 230, the prediction engine 126 determines, as the output features 412, a session timeout value 414 and an idle timeout value 416.
Thus, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of claimed invention to use the teachings of Kukreja in the SMS session management of Wells in order to individualize the timeout (duration time) session based on characteristics of users to reduce the risk of session hijacking (Kukreja: paragraph 4).
For claim 2 Wells teaches The cellular network system, further comprising the cellular core network (Fig. 1 “cellular core network 540”).
For claim 3 Wells teaches The cellular network system of claim 2, further comprising the SMSC (Fig. 1 “cellular core network 540”).
For claims 4 and 15 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The cellular network system, wherein the machine learning model comprises a trained neural network (Kukreja: paragraph 5 “the ML model can be constructed as a neural network” and pargraph 45 “the ML model are implemented as neural networks ant the neural networks are trained accordingly”).
For claims 5 and 16 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The cellular network system of claim 4, wherein the trained neural network perform a classification to determine a timer duration (Kukreja: paragraph 6 “RBAC policy indicates that the session timeout value should be determined using an ML model that employs information for various user groups (user classes)”).
For claim 6 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The cellular network system, wherein the cellular network messaging controller is further configured to:
transmit a channel maintenance instruction to keep the cellular communication channel active based on the determined duration of time (Kukreja: paragraph 40 “the prediction engine 126 can be configured to learn the amount of user history that should be collected in order for an ML model to be able to determine an appropriate timeout parameter value (e.g., a session timeout duration that is close to typical session lengths for a particular user or an idle timeout duration that is close to the time length for which the user is usually active before becoming idle” and paragraph 53 “creation and expiration times for access tokens may be indicative of how long the user remained active in connection with accessing a particular resource”).
For claim 7 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The cellular network system of claim 2, wherein the cellular base station is configured to receive the transmitted channel maintenance instruction and adjust a timer based on the determined duration of time (Kukreja: Fig. 2 “session timeout and idle timeout determination” and Fig. 6 “select a default timeout value 610 and degerming, using the personal ML model, at least one timeout value … based on the information about user 612”) .
For claim 11 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The cellular network system, further comprising the UE, wherein the UE is configured to transmit a cellular service request in response to the SMS message being ready to be sent (Wells: Fig. 6 “receiving a request to initiate or join an SMS session facilitated by the SMS server”).
For claim 12 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The cellular network system of claim 11, further comprising the UE configured to:
transmit the SMS message via the cellular communication channel (Wells: Fig. 6 “receiving a request to initiate or join an SMS session facilitated by the SMS server”); and
send the one or more characteristics of use of the UE to the cellular BS (Wells: Fig. 6 “receiving a request to initiate or join an SMS session facilitated by the SMS server…deleting individual SMS messages from an SMS session upon user request and selection” and paragraph 35 “the user may utilize PBX features on the UE 115 that may be customized to their business needs”).
For claim 13 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The cellular network system, wherein the cellular communication channel, while active, comprises radio resources being reserved for use between the cellular BS and the UE (Wells: paragraph 89 “servers may manage workloads provided by multiple users (e.g., cloud resource customers or other users)”).
For claim 14 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches a method (as discussed in claim 1) comprising:
establishing a cellular communication channel between a user equipment (UE) and a gNodeB of a cellular network for sending a short message service (SMS) message in response to a cellular service request from the UE (as discussed in claim 1);
determining, using a machine learning model, a duration of time for which the cellular communication channel is to be kept active (as discussed in claim 1) based on one or more characteristics selected from the group consisting of:
a use characteristic of the UE (as discussed in claim 1);
a characteristic of the UE (as discussed in claim 1),
transmitting a channel maintenance instruction based on the determined duration of time for which the cellular communication channel is to be kept active (Kukreja: Fig. 2 “session and idle timeout transmission” and as discussed in claim 1).
For claim 17 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The method, further comprising:
transmitting, by the UE, the SMS message via the cellular communication channel (Wells: paragraph 6 “manage a short message service (SMS) message
session between a first user equipment (UE) and a second UE, wherein the SMS session is identified by a telephone number for the first UE or the second UE”); and
sending, by the UE, the use characteristic to the cellular network (Wells: paragraph 6 “manage a short message service (SMS) message session between a first user equipment (UE) and a second UE, wherein the SMS session is identified by a telephone number (use characteristics) for the first UE or the second UE”).
For claim 18 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches The method of claim 15, further comprising: receiving, by a gNodeB, the transmitted channel maintenance instruction (as discussed in claim 6); and adjusting, by the gNodeB, a timer based on the determined duration of time for which cellular communication is to be kept active (as discussed in claim 7).
For claim 20 Wells in view of Kukreja teaches a non-transitory processor-readable medium, comprising processor-readable instructions (as discussed in claim 1) configured to cause one or more processors to:
establish a cellular communication channel between a user equipment (UE) and a gNodeB of a cellular network for sending a short message service (SMS) message in response to a cellular service request from the UE (as discussed in claim 1);
determine, using a machine learning model, a duration of time for which the cellular communication channel is to be kept active (as discussed in claim 1) based on one or more characteristics selected from the group consisting of:
a use characteristic of the UE (as discussed in claim 1);
a characteristic of the UE (as discussed in claim 1),
cause a channel maintenance instruction to be transmitted based on the determined duration of time for which the cellular communication channel is to be kept active (Kukreja: Fig. 2 “session and idle timeout transmission” and as discussed in claim 1).
7. Claims 8-10 and 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Wells (US 2016/0105781 A1) in view of Kukreja et al. (2021/0014221 A1) and further in view of Nagaraja et al. (US 2018/0027594 A1).
For claim 8 Wells in view of Kukreja does not explicitly teach The cellular network system of claim 3, wherein the cellular base station is a gNodeB comprising a distributed unit (DU) and a centralized unit (CU).
However, Nagaraja teaches a base station gNB (gNodeB) comprising a DU and a CU (Nagaraja: paragraph 6).
Thus, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of claimed invention to use the teachings of Nagaraja in the combined cellular system of Kukreja and Wells in order to upgrade the base station to 5G (NR) network by maintain similar inventive features and provide 5G capabilities (Nagaraja: paragraph 6 and pargraph 92).
For claims 9 and 19 Wells in view of Kukreja does not explicitly teach The cellular network system, wherein the duration of time is used to set a T300 timer.
However, Nagaraja teaches a UE may initiate a T300 timer…the UE may freeze or adjust the T300 (Nagaraja: paragraph 106).
Thus, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of claimed invention to use the teachings of Nagaraja in the combined cellular system of Kukreja and Wells in order to use timer T300 to supervise the initial RRC connection establishment process between the UE and the eNodeB, ensuring the network responds to the UE’s RRC Connection Request within a defined time window (Nagaraja: paragraph 106).
For claim 10 Wells in view of Kukreja does not explicitly teach The cellular network system of claim 9, wherein when the T300 timer expires, the cellular communication channel is set to idle.
However, Nagaraja teaches a UE may initiate a T300 timer…the UE may freeze or adjust the T300 (Nagaraja: paragraph 106).
Thus, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of claimed invention to use the teachings of Nagaraja in the combined cellular system of Kukreja and Wells in order to use timer T300 to supervise the initial RRC connection establishment process between the UE and the eNodeB, ensuring the network responds to the UE’s RRC Connection Request within a defined time window (Nagaraja: paragraph 106).
Conclusion
8. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure: Xue et al. (US 8,670,425 B1).
9. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to David M OVEISSI whose telephone number is (571)270-3127. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8Am-5PM.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Jeffrey Rutkowski can be reached at (571) 270-1215. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/MANSOUR OVEISSI/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2415
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