DETAILED ACTION
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 of this title, 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 16, 18, 20-22, 24, 26-28, 30, 31, and 33 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable Gurumoorthy et al. (US 2024/0049113, “Gurumoorthy”) in view of Li et al. (US 2025/0142452, “Li”).
Regarding claim 16, Gurumoorthy discloses a method performed by a user equipment (UE) in a communication system, the method comprising:
- receiving a system information block (SIB) associated with a tracking reference signal (TRS) (See 310 Fig.3, UE receives SIB segments; See ¶.73, the network may configure the common aspects of TRS signaling in a first subset of one or more SIB segments (M) for a set of SIB segments (0 to N−1)), wherein the SIB incudes a segment number and a segment type (See Fig.7, SegmentType and SegmentNumber; See ¶.35, the exemplary embodiments include two types of SIB segmentation approaches, soft segmentation and hard segmentation; See ¶.63, a SIB being configured as a particular number of SIB segments; See ¶.69, the SIB container may include a field that indicates the current segment number for each segmented system information instances. For example, the SIB segment container may include an integer value between 0 and N−1 where N is the total number of SIB segments);
- identifying that the SIB includes a segment for the SIB corresponding to the segment number and the segment type (See ¶.21, SIBs are typically identified using numbers and/or letters, e.g., SIB1, SIB2, SIBpos, etc.; See ¶.70, as part of this decoding, the UE 110 may be identify the current SIB-X based on SIB type information encoded as part of the OCTET string);
- storing the received segment (See ¶.24, the UE to receive all three SIB segments, assemble the contents of the three SIB segments and then decode the contents of the SIB; Examiner’s Note: Li discloses the limitations “storing the received segment”).
In Gurumoorthy’s system, it is necessary that the UE needs to save the received segments in order to receive all SIB segments and assemble the contents of the SIB segments, but silent on what Li discloses “storing the received segment” (Li, See ¶.45, the terminal device first saves the current segment and continues to wait for receiving a next segment).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to apply the method of “storing the received segment” as taught by Li into the system of Gurumoorthy, so that it provides of waiting for receiving a next segment and then determining whether all segments of the SIB have been received (Li, See ¶.45 & ¶.95).
Regarding claim 18, Gurumoorthy and Li disclose “in case that the UE has stored at least one segment for SIB and a value tag for the SIB is changed since a previous segment was stored, discarding the at least one stored segment (Gurumoorthy, See Fig.5, valueTag; See ¶.56, deciding to discard a particular SIB segment; Li, See ¶.58, the network device may send an SIB change notification to the terminal device to notify the terminal device that the SIB has changed. After receiving the SIB change notification, the terminal device may read and obtain an updated SIB. Therefore, the above method may further include: configuring, by the network device, at least one value tag of at least one SIB for the terminal device, in which the at least one value tag is configured to indicate the terminal device to update the at least one SIB).” Therefore, this claim is rejected with the similar reasons and motivation set forth in the rejection of claim 16.
Regarding claim 20, Gurumoorthy and Li disclose “in case that all segments for the SIB is received, assembling the received segments; and in case that the assembling is not performed within a predefined duration, discarding stored segments of the SIB (Gurumoorthy, See ¶.32, assembling the individual SIB segments and then decoding the contents of the SIB; See 945 Fig.9, reassemble SIB segments and decode SIB-X; Li, See ¶.96, determining, by the terminal device when the first duration expires, that the at least one segment is not all segments of the target system information and discarding the at least one segment).” Therefore, this claim is rejected with the similar reasons and motivation set forth in the rejection of claim 16.
Regarding claim 21, Gurumoorthy discloses “a plurality of TRS configurations are configured based on the SIB, wherein a layer-1 (L1) based availability indication field for a plurality of TRS configurations is received in downlink control information (DCI), and wherein each TRS configuration is associated with each bit in the L1 based availability indication field (See ¶.20, A network may impose a maximum SIB size limit. For example, due to physical layer restrictions or any other appropriate factor, there may be a maximum SIB size limit of (L) bits. Under conventional circumstances, the maximum SIB size limit may prevent currently implemented SIBs from being configured to include unconventional/new types of information and may hinder the introduction of a new type of SIB. Accordingly, the maximum SIB size limit is an aspect of SIB design that may prevent SIBs from being utilized by the network to provide certain types of information to UEs; See ¶.49, TRS configuration information may be beam specific. In some instances, there may be up to 64 (or more) beams to consider. While SIB-X does not have any specific size restrictions with regard to the number of TRS configurations that can be provided to the idle/inactive UEs via a SIB-X, a maximum SIB size limit may be imposed by the network and/or the physical layer. It has been identified that the size of the TRS configuration information (N bits) may exceed the maximum SIB size limit (L bits). The exemplary SIB segmentation techniques described herein may enable SIB-X or any other type of SIB to be utilized even when the contents of the SIB exceed the maximum SIB size limit).” Therefore, this claim is rejected with the similar reasons and motivation set forth in the rejection of claim 16.
Regarding claim 22, it is a user equipment claim corresponding to the method claim 16 and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claim.
Regarding claims 24, 26, and 27, they are claims corresponding to claims 18, 20, & 21, respectively and are therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claims.
Regarding claim 28, it is a method claim performed by a base station corresponding to the method claim 16 performed by a UE and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claim.
Regarding claim 30, it is a claim corresponding to the claim 21 and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claim.
Regarding claim 31, it is a base station claim corresponding to the method claim 28 and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claim.
Regarding claim 33, it is a claim corresponding to the claim 21 and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claim.
Claims 17, 19, 23, 25, 29, and 32 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gurumoorthy in view of Li and further in view of Tseng et al. (US 2022/0014980, “Tseng”).
Regarding claim 17, Gurumoorthy discloses “the segment is an N+1th segment for the SIB, where N is a value of the segment number which is a non-negative integer from 0 to 63, and wherein the segment type indicates whether the segment is a last segment for the SIB or not (Gurumoorthy, See Fig.7 and ¶.69, notLastSegment, or LastSegment; See ¶.69, N is the total number of SIB segments),”
but Gurumoorthy and Li do not explicitly disclose what Tseng discloses “integer from 0 to 63” (Tseng, See ¶.5, the data associated with each SIB segment, such as a segment number (e.g., an integer within a range of 0 to 63)). Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to apply “a value of the segment number from 0 to 63” as taught by Tseng into the system of Gurumoorthy and Li, so that it provides identifying the corresponding SIB segments (Tseng, See ¶.5).
Regarding claim 19, Gurumoorthy and Li do not explicitly disclose what Tseng discloses “in case that a cell selection or a cell reselection is performed, discarding stored segments of the SIB (Tseng, See ¶.89 and ¶.105, discarding the stored SIB segments after cell selection/re-selection).” Therefore, this claim is rejected with the similar reasons and motivation set forth in the rejection of claim 17.
Regarding claims 23, 25, 29, and 32, they are claims corresponding to claims 17, 19, 17, & 17 respectively and are therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of the claims.
Contact Information
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Jung H Park whose telephone number is 571-272-8565. The examiner can normally be reached M-F: 7:00 AM-3:00 PM.
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/JUNG H PARK/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2411
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