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 .
This action is in response to the application filed on August 12, 2024
Claims 1-20 are under examination.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
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.
The factual inquiries set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 148 USPQ 459 (1966), that are applied for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Earnshaw et al. (US: 2013/0176981 A1) in view of Heo et al. (US: 2010/0297993 A1).
As per Claim 1 Earnshaw teaches a communication method applied in a network device, the method comprising:
ending carrier range information to a terminal, wherein the carrier range information indicates the terminal to report capability information to the network device, and wherein the carrier range information carries at least one of an aggregated carrier bandwidth upper limit of a band or a carrier quantity upper limit of the band (Paragraph 0015, 0021, 0050, depending on the deployment scenario, carrier aggregation may occur with carriers located in the same frequency band and/or carriers located in non-adjacent (non-contiguous) frequency bands. For example, one carrier may be located at 2 GHz and a second non-adjacent aggregated carrier may be located at 800 MHz, conveyed in the system information, or otherwise conveyed or implicitly derived by the receiver from other system information parameters. The relative bandwidths of the aggregated carriers are used to partition the soft buffer based on the expectation that transport blocks received on a wider bandwidth carrier may have a larger size (or larger maximum size) than transport blocks received on a narrower bandwidth carrier. These weighting factors could either be explicitly broadcast (as a separate new information field in one of the system information blocks (e.g. SIB2) a broadcast message used in cellular networks (such as 4G LTE and 5G NR) to transmit essential network and cell parameters to mobile devices ) or could be implicitly derived from an existing information field within the system information, such as by deriving the carrier bandwidth for each aggregated carrier from an existing system information parameter.); and
receiving capability information of at least one carrier from the terminal, wherein the capability information corresponds to at least one carrier in the band, and and/or a quantity of carriers of the least one carrier is less than or equal to the carrier quantity upper limit (Paragraph 0021, 0045, 0046,0050, depending on the deployment scenario, carrier aggregation may occur with carriers located in the same frequency band and/or carriers located in non-adjacent (non-contiguous) frequency bands. For example, one carrier may be located at 2 GHz and a second non-adjacent aggregated carrier may be located at 800 MHz. The first equation (Equation 4) removes the impact of MIMO transmission modes on soft buffer sizes. That is, for example, the soft buffer sizes for transport blocks on a 20 MHz carrier configured with a MIMO transmission mode (i.e. a maximum of two transport blocks per HARQ process) would be the same size as for a 20 MHz carrier configured with a non-MIMO transmission mode (i.e. a maximum of one transport block per HARQ process). ).
Rudolf does not explicitly disclose wherein an aggregated bandwidth of the at least one carrier is less than or equal to the aggregated carrier bandwidth upper limit
However, Heo from an analogous art similarly teaches wherein an aggregated bandwidth of the at least one carrier is less than or equal to the aggregated carrier bandwidth upper limit (Paragraph 0022, 0096, 0103, 0104 FIG. 12 illustrates an embodiment of a method 1200 for reporting power headroom-related information for a plurality of aggregated carriers. The user agent includes a component configured such that the user agent transmits power headroom-related information for a number of aggregated carriers that is less than or equal to the total number of aggregated carriers in a plurality of aggregated carriers. At block 1210, power headroom-related information is reported for a number of the aggregated carriers that is less than or equal to the total number of aggregated carriers.. The UA can select carriers based on the logical or physical carrier indexing. In one embodiment, the UA can select a carrier based on the priority of carrier. For example, the UA can transmit PH of the uplink anchor carrier or carrier transmitting the high QoS data. FIG. 1. In this example, each component carrier 110 has a width of 20 MHz and the total system bandwidth becomes 100 MHz. The UA may receive or transmit on a multiple of up to five component carriers depending on its capabilities. In addition, depending on the deployment scenario, carrier aggregation may occur with carriers located in the same band and/or carriers located in different bands. For example, one carrier may be located at 2 GHz and a second aggregated carrier may be located at 800 MHz. );
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Earnshaw to include the teaching of Heo so the number of the aggregated carriers that is less than or equal to the total number of aggregated carriers... (See Heo abstract).
As per Claim 2 Earnshaw-Heo teaches the method according to claim 1, wherein the capability information comprises at least one of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) capability corresponding to the at least one carrier or a channel state information (CSI) capability corresponding to the at least one carrier (Paragraph 0026, 0031, 0036 rate dematching 141, the encoded soft bit values for one or two received transport blocks (depending upon the MIMO mode) are delivered to the DL HARQ entity 143 which coordinates the DL HARQ activity. At the same time, the DL HARQ entity 143 receives additional control signaling information from control signaling block 140, such as the transport block size(s) For the case of no spatial multiplexing (K.sub.MIMO=1), the soft buffer size for a transport block N.sub.IR=154656, and for the case of spatial multiplexing (K.sub.MIMO=2), the soft buffer size for a transport block N.sub.IR=77328. ).
As per Claim 3 Earnshaw-Heo teaches method according to claim 1, wherein the carrier range information is carried in the capability information (Paragraph 0023, 0028 For example, a Category 3 Rel-10 UE could support carrier aggregation of 2 carriers each with a 10 MHz bandwidth, and the carrier aggregation related information would be communicated via additional UE capability signaling. The size of the soft bit buffer is defined in terms of the number of soft channel bits, where each soft bit represents a numerical value such as a LLR used for Forward Error Correction (FEC) decoding purposes. In addition, each soft bit value requires one or more bits of physical memory storage, depending on the range of numerical values being used. In LTE, a total number of soft channel bits for all downlink HARQ processes is defined in terms of the UE category. ).
As per Claim 4 Earnshaw-Heo teaches method according to claim 1, wherein the capability information carries an index indicating a capability information set including first capability information of each carrier of the at least carrier in the band (Paragraph 0023, 0024 UE Categories 6-8 have been newly introduced to take full advantage of Rel-10 features, and UE Categories 1-5 were originally defined for Rel-8 UEs, although these categories can also be used for Rel-10 UEs with the full UE capability (e.g., carrier aggregation abilities) being communicated via separate signaling. For example, a Category 3 Rel-10 UE could support carrier aggregation of 2 carriers each with a 10 MHz bandwidth, and the carrier aggregation related information would be communicated via additional UE capability signaling. Since the number of supported layers for spatial multiplexing in the downlink will be signaled separately, this parameter is not included in the UE Categories table. ).
As per Claim 5 Earnshaw-Heo teaches method according to claim 1, wherein the aggregated carrier bandwidth upper limit is for a specific frequency band, and the carrier quantity upper limit is for the specific frequency band (Paragraph 0024, 0034, 0047 For example, the carrier weighting factors could be communicated using dedicated RRC signaling to provide UE-specific carrier weighting factors to a particular UE. This RRC signaling could be the signaling used to configure carrier aggregation for the UE. Specifically, the UE-specific carrier weighting factors are included in the RRC signaling that adds a SCC to the UE or in the RRC signaling that modifies the configuration of an already-configured component carrier (PCC or SCC) of the UE. A specific set of bits is selected for transmission simply by identifying the appropriate starting position within the buffer, and then reading the desired number of stored bits out of the buffer in order and wrapping around to the beginning of the buffer if the end of the buffer is reached).
As per Claim 6 Earnshaw-Heo teaches method according to claim 1, further comprising: receiving information about a maximum carrier aggregation capability supported by the terminal (Paragraph 0022, 0028 UE category Maximum number of Maximum number of Maximum number DL-SCH transport bits of a DL-SCH Total number of of supported block bits received transport block received soft channel bits layers for spatial UE. This is shown above in Table 1 where each UE category has a maximum number of downlink shared channel (DL-SCH) transport block bits received within a TTI (Transmission Time Interval). ).
Claims 7-20 are a wireless apparatus claims corresponding to the methods claims 1-6 that have been rejected above. Applicant attention is directed to the rejection of claims 1-6. Claims 7-20 are rejected under the same rational as claims 1-6.
Examiner’s Note
Examiner is open for discussion if the applicant’s representative need further clarifications.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. (See form 892).
Conclusion
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/SYED ALI/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2463
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