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 08/27/2024. Claims 1 and through 6 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 Rejections – 35 USC § 101
4. 35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because recites “constructing a beam domain channel model for the spatial non-stationary massive MIMO system” which seems it is an abstract idea that can envisaged by a human. In addition, it is not clear whether a machine or human is construction the model. It is also not clear what ingredient and steps are being used to build a beam domain channel model for the spatial non-stationary massive MIMO system. Further, it is not clear how the steps 2-3 are being obtained wherein the domain channel model for the spatial non-stationary massive MIMO system seems to be a black box. In order to obtain a beam structure, the model needs to have certain inquiries input to the domain channel model. Therefore, to withdraw the 101 rejection, the model operation and its usage must be described.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
5. The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, because it is not clear how the obtaining steps are performed based on the step 1 while the step 1 itself is a general statement. The details of a beam domain channel model for the spatial non-stationary massive MIMO system is not transparent to allow the derivations of step 2 and step 3. It seems claim 2 must be rolled up to claim 1 after the step 1 of claim 1 in order to make step 2 and 3 of claim 1 obtainable.
Claim 2-6 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, because of their dependency from claim 1.
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.
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gao et al. (US 2022/0263554 A1) in view of Chaoyuan et al. (2022) “An Improved Sparsity Adaptive Matching Pursuit Algorithm for Sparse Channel Estimation” provided by the applicant.
For claim 1 Gao teaches a method for estimating a beam domain channel in a spatial non-stationary massive MIMO system (paragraph 7 “a massive MIMO beam domain robust precoding transmission method is provided”), wherein the method comprises following steps:
Step S1, constructing a beam domain channel model for the spatial non-stationary massive MIMO system (paragraph 7 “a massive MIMO beam domain robust precoding transmission method is provided”);
Step S2, obtaining, according to the beam domain channel model, a beam sparse structure, obtaining, according to an influence of power leakage, a power ratio threshold, and transforming, a problem for estimating the beam domain channel into a problem for reconstructing a sparse communication channel (paragraph 7 “a massive MIMO beam domain robust precoding transmission method is provided” paragraph 25 “performing the sparse calculation of initial conjugate gradient in the refined beam domain by using the a posteriori statistical channel information”, paragraph 2 “”power efficiency (power leakage and power ratio)”, and paragraph 5 “to resolve a problem of adaptation of a massive MIMO technology to various typical scenarios”); and
Step S3, obtaining, based on the beam sparse structure, a dominant beam support, refining, according to the power radio threshold, the dominant beam support, obtaining, by adopting a beam domain structure-based sparsity adaptive matching pursuit (BDS-SAMP) scheme, a beam support set, sequentially reconstructing, according to the beam support set, a beam domain channel vector for a single user, and obtaining an estimating communication channel matrix (paragraph 61 “To describe the problem more clearly, a specific estimation method is provided below. To estimate the channel energy matrix”, Fig. 1 “A BS obtains a priori statistical channel information of UEs in a refined beam domain through uplink sounding”, and abstract “the provided robust precoding design utilizes the sparsity of a beam domain channel and the structural characteristics of a sampling steering vector matrix”).
Gao does not explicitly teach SAMP.
However, Chaoyuan teaches reconstruction algorithm is proposed for sparse signal, i.e. variable step-size sparsity adaptive matching pursuit (SAMP) algorithm… Our simulation results show that the proposed DV-SAMP algorithm outperforms the SAMP and other greedy reconstruction algorithms in reconstructing sparse signals (see Chaoyuan: introduction).
Thus, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of claimed invention to apply the teachings of Chaoyuan in the massive MIMO beam domain of Gao in order to apply DV-SAMP algorithm to perform better channel estimation (see Chaoyuan: introduction).
Conclusion
6. 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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/MANSOUR OVEISSI/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2415
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