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 .
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Title of the Invention
The title of the invention is not descriptive. A new title is required that is clearly indicative of the invention to which the claims are directed.
Proposal: "Sequence-Based Physical Uplink Control Channel (PUCCH) Transmission with Priority-Differentiated Multiplexing"
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.
Claim(s) 1-5 and 7-9 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Yang et al. (US 2021/0092734, “Yang”) in view of Islam et al. (US 2021/0250134, “Islam”).
Examiner’s note: in what follows, references are drawn to Yang unless otherwise mentioned.
Yang comprises the following features:
With respect to independent claims:
Regarding claim 1, a terminal, comprising:
control circuitry (See Fig. 8: 800 “Processor”), which, in operation, determines at least one sequence or at least one combination from a plurality of sequences or a plurality of combinations of sequences ([0130] “UE 115 may then select the sequence x=…” See the paragraph for detail symbolic characters.) according to a value of an information bit ([0129] “the UE 115 may convert the binary string a (e.g., a.sub.0, a.sub.1, . . . , a.sub.k−1) corresponding to the UCI to a decimal value, which may be denoted by l.sub.a. The binary string may be converted to the decimal value l.sub.a by the equation l.sub.a=Σ.sub.i=0.sup.k−12.sup.ia.sub.i or by the equation l.sub.a=Σ.sub.i=0.sup.k−12.sup.ia.sub.k−1−i or by other equations to convert the string to decimal values.”), in an uplink transmission without using a reference signal ([0071] “In order to improve the coverage, sequence-based transmission may be used instead of a channel-coding based scheme. Sequence-based transmission may not use coding or modulation, and may not include the generation or transmission of a DMRS.”): and
transmission circuitry (See Fig. 8 for 820 “Transceiver”) which, in operation, multiplexes information bits of different priorities in an uplink resource (This will be discussed in view of Islam.) and transmits the information bits, by using the at least one sequence or the at least one combination ([0073] “UE performing sequence-based transmission may generate a sequence based on the UCI payload, and transmit the sequence to the base station.”) ([Islam, 0057] “If communication of more than one service type with varying reliability and latency requirements can be made in a carrier/serving cell, it is possible that scheduled/configured resource for transmission of a first service type may overlap with resource for transmission of a second service type for a given UE. … Hence, solution is necessary for efficient multiplexing of UL transmissions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ priority for a given UE which may provide better flexibility in resource management without sacrificing QoS requirements for either service types much.”, and [Islam, 0016] “the PUCCH resource for the first HARQ-ACK codebook overlaps with the PUCCH resource for the second HARQ-ACK codebook, to multiplex the first priority HARQ-ACK bits and the second priority HARQ-ACK bits when the second priority is a higher priority than the first priority,”).
It is noted that while disclosing determining a sequence, Yang does not specifically teach about multiplexing different priorities. It, however, had been known in the art before the effective date of the instant application as shown by Islam as follows;
multiplexes information bits of different priorities in an uplink resource ([Islam, 0057] “If communication of more than one service type with varying reliability and latency requirements can be made in a carrier/serving cell, it is possible that scheduled/configured resource for transmission of a first service type may overlap with resource for transmission of a second service type for a given UE. … Hence, solution is necessary for efficient multiplexing of UL transmissions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ priority for a given UE which may provide better flexibility in resource management without sacrificing QoS requirements for either service types much.”, and [Islam, 0016] “the PUCCH resource for the first HARQ-ACK codebook overlaps with the PUCCH resource for the second HARQ-ACK codebook, to multiplex the first priority HARQ-ACK bits and the second priority HARQ-ACK bits when the second priority is a higher priority than the first priority,”).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of instant application to modify Yang by using the features of Islam in order to improve DMRS-less PUCCH coverage such that “The UE may multiplex the first priority HARQ-ACK bits and the second priority HARQ-ACK bits in a PUCCH transmission when the PUCCH resources for the first and the second HARQ-ACK codebooks overlap.” [Islam, Abstract].
Regarding claim 7, it is a base station claim corresponding to the method claim 1 in a reciprocal way, except the limitations, “reception circuitry” (See Fig. 12 for 1220.) and “control circuitry” (See Fig. 12 for 1240.), and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of claim 1.
Regarding claim 8, it is a method claim corresponding to the method claim 1, and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of claim 1.
Regarding claim 9, it is a method claim corresponding to the method claim 7, and is therefore rejected for the similar reasons set forth in the rejection of claim 7.
With respect to dependent claims:
Regarding claim 2, the terminal according to claim 1, wherein the control circuity determines one sequence or one combination individually for each of the information bits of the different priorities (aforesaid [0129] establishes the operation of determining “one sequence” for “an information bit” as claimed, but Yang applies this to a single, undifferentiated UCI payload, that is, Yang’s detailed description contains no disclosure of repeating or applying this determination “individually” to two separate, priority-differentiated bit strings. Islam’s detailed description in [Islam, 0013] “the UE may separately encode the first priority HARQ-ACK bits and the second priority HARQ-ACK bits for multiplexing in the PUCCH resource” explicitly teaches processing priority’s bits through as separate, individual operation.
Regarding claim 3, the terminal according to claim 2, wherein in a case where the transmission circuitry multiplexes the information bits of the different priorities in the uplink resource and transmits the information bits,
the transmission circuitry maps the one sequence to the uplink resource and transmits the one sequence ([0074] “Sequence based transmission may generally include a UE performing sequence generation, mapping the sequence to resource elements (REs), and transmitting the sequence in a PUCCH”), or
the transmission circuitry maps the one combination to the uplink resource and transmits the combination, the one sequence or the one combination being determined individually for each of the information bits of the different priorities (aforesaid [Islam, 0013 and 0016]).
Regarding claim 4, the terminal according to claim 1, wherein the control circuit, determines one combination ([0047] “Determining the UCI payload may include operations, features, means, or instructions for identifying that the uplink control sequence may have been multiplied with a signature sequence prior to transmission of the uplink control sequence.”) from the plurality of combinations included in a sequence pool ([0025] “Using the multiplexing index to map the UCI payload to the uplink control sequence may include operations, features, means, or instructions for selecting the uplink control sequence from a set of uplink control sequences based on the UCI payload and the multiplexing index.”), according to a first information bit of a first priority and a second information bit of a second priority lower than the first priority ([Islam, 0085] “O.sub.ACK,low and O.sub.ACK,high HARQ-ACK bits corresponding to low and high priority codebooks are concatenated in bit domain before encoding according to PUCCH format (PF) 2, 3, or 4. For larger payload sizes, CRC is added. The control information (after CRC attachment, e.g., O.sub.CRC bits) to be transmitted is encoded”).
Regarding claim 5, the terminal according to claim 4, wherein: the sequence pool includes a plurality of subsets each of which is associated with a candidate for a value of the first information bit, and each of the plurality of subsets includes a combination of sequences each of which is associated with a candidate for a value of the second information bit, and the control circuitry selects one subset from the plurality of subsets according to the value of the first information bit and selects the one combination from the one subset according to the value of the second information bit ([0024] “Using the multiplexing index to map the UCI payload to the uplink control sequence may include operations, features, means, or instructions for selecting a set of uplink control sequences from a set of sets of uplink control sequences based on the multiplexing index, and selecting the uplink control sequence from the set of uplink control sequences.”, [Islam, 0011] “the first priority is a low priority (LP) and the second priority is a high priority (HP).”, and [Islam, 0012] “the configuration information may include a priority index ‘0’ to indicate the first priority (e.g., the low priority) and a priority index of ‘1’ to indicate the second priority (e.g., high priority). In these embodiments, the first priority may be a lower priority than the second priority”).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim(s) 6 objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
The claim contains the following underlined features which, when combined with other features of the claim, prior art of record failed to anticipate or render obvious before the effective filing date of the instant application was filed:
6. The terminal according to claim 5, wherein: in a case where a number of a plurality of the second information bits is NLP bits, a number of sequences included in the subset is SLP, and a number of sequences included in the combination is KLP,
[1] SLP/KLP(SLP-KLP)≥ 2NLP or SLP/(SLP-KLP)≥ 2NLP is satisfied.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Harry H. Kim whose telephone number and email address are as follows; 571-272-5009, harry.kim2@uspto.gov.
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/HARRY H KIM/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2411
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