DETAILED ACTION
Status of Case
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
This Office Action is in response to the claims filed on 9/4/2024.
Claims 1-15 are pending.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) filed on 9/4/2024 and 2/13/2026 have been considered by Examiner.
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.
Claims 1-4, 8-11, and 14-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over ZTE (“Remaining FFSs on discontinuous coverage in IoT NTN,” 3GPP DRAFT; R2-2200694, vol. RAN WG2, no. electronic, XP052093832, 2022-01-11) (cited in Applicant’s IDS filed on 2/13/2026) in view of Liao (USPAN 2012/0178449).
Consider claims 1 and 8, ZTE discloses a method performed by a user equipment (UE) (see sections 2.1 and 2.2, wherein disclosed is said method), and a corresponding user equipment (UE) in a communication system, the UE comprising: a transceiver; and a processor coupled with the transceiver (see section 2.2: Examiner submits that it is inherent that the UE comprises said transceiver and processor) and configured to: identify discontinuous coverage of a satellite access in a network being occurred (see section 2.1: a way for UE to predict coverage discontinuity; “Providing the start-time of (incoming) satellite’s coverage and end-time of serving satellite’s coverage is needed for Qausi-Earth Fixed satellites,” such timing information could assist UE to predict service discontinuity); identify whether configuration information associated with a wait timer for the discontinuous coverage is configured or not; in case that the configuration information associated with the wait timer is configured (see section 2.2: “eNB could implicitly indicate to UE the duration of coverage discontinuity via the legacy IE extendedWaitTime”): start the wait timer with a random time, wherein the random time is within a provided range of the wait timer (see section 2.2: “the current value of the wait time may be not enough to match the duration of coverage discontinuity, for example, extendedWaitTime-r10 can be INTEGER (1…1800)…Proposal 4:…value range of extendedWaitTime”); “NAS may trigger another connection setup procedure if it receives the data from application layer…in order to avoid UE to attempt any legacy AS or NAS layer processes before upcoming coverage discontinuity”).
ZTE does not specifically disclose initiating a signaling to the network after the wait timer is expired
Liao discloses initiating a signaling to the network after the wait timer is expired (see claim 14: the mobile device waits for a random period of time before initiating a transmission of a request message to the service network).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of ZTE and combine it with the noted teachings of Liao. The motivation to combine these references is to provide a method for handling mobility management back-offs by properly controlling related timers and counters (see paragraph 3 of Liao).
Consider claims 2 and 9, ZTE in view of Liao disclose that in case that the configuration information associated with the wait timer is not configured, initiating the signaling to the network without waiting any random time (it is implicit that if there is no configuration associated with a wait timer, then a wait timer is therefore not used and thus not initiated and transmission is performed without a wait time).
Consider claims 3 and 10, ZTE discloses that the signaling to the network is not initiated while the wait timer is running (see section 2.2: extendedWaitTime timer; the very function of said wait timer is to prevent signaling to the network from initiating while the wait timer is running).
Consider claims 4 and 11, ZTE discloses that the configuration information associated with the wait timer includes the provided range (see section 2.2: “the current value of the wait time may be not enough to match the duration of coverage discontinuity, for example, extendedWaitTime-r10 can be INTEGER (1…1800)…Proposal 4:…value range of extendedWaitTime”).
Consider claims 14 and 15, ZTE discloses a method performed by a node in a communication system (see sections 2.1 and 2.2, wherein disclosed is said method), and a corresponding node in a communication system, the node comprising: a transceiver; and a processor coupled with the transceiver (see section 2.2: Examiner submits that it is inherent that the eNB comprises said transceiver and processor) and configured to: identify a range for a wait timer, wherein a random time of the wait timer is within the range (see section 2.2: “the current value of the wait time may be not enough to match the duration of coverage discontinuity, for example, extendedWaitTime-r10 can be INTEGER (1…1800)…Proposal 4:…value range of extendedWaitTime”)); and transmit, to a user equipment (UE), configuration information associated with the wait timer, wherein in case that discontinuous coverage of a satellite access in a network including the node is occurred (see section 2.2: “eNB could implicitly indicate to UE the duration of coverage discontinuity via the legacy IE extendedWaitTime”).
ZTE does not specifically disclose a signaling from the UE is received after the wait timer with the random number is expired.
Liao discloses a signaling from the UE is received after the wait timer with the random number is expired (see claim 14: the mobile device waits for a random period of time before initiating a transmission of a request message to the service network).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of ZTE and combine it with the noted teachings of Liao. The motivation to combine these references is to provide a method for handling mobility management back-offs by properly controlling related timers and counters (see paragraph 3 of Liao).
Claims 5-6 and 12-13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over ZTE (“Remaining FFSs on discontinuous coverage in IoT NTN,” 3GPP DRAFT; R2-2200694, vol. RAN WG2, no. electronic, XP052093832, 2022-01-11) (cited in Applicant’s IDS filed on 2/13/2026) in view of Liao (USPAN 2012/0178449) and Ryu (USPAN 2013/0107778).
Consider claims 5 and 12, ZTE discloses that the configuration information is associated with the wait timer (see above), but does not disclose configuration by a home public land mobile network (HPLMN) associated with the network.
Ryu discloses configuration by a home public land mobile network (HPLMN) associated with the network (see paragraph 54: the UE is configured by the Home PLMN (HPLMN)).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of ZTE and combine it with the noted teachings of Ryu. The motivation to combine these references is to provide a method for performing random access procedure with extended access barring (see paragraph 3 of Ryu).
Consider claims 6 and 13, ZTE discloses that the configuration information is associated with the wait timer (see above), but does not disclose that the wait timer is based on a priority of the UE.
Ryu discloses that tat the wait timer is based on a priority of the UE (see paragraph 46: the extended wait time is based on the priority of the UE, particularly for lower priority situations).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of ZTE and combine it with the noted teachings of Ryu. The motivation to combine these references is to provide a method for performing random access procedure with extended access barring (see paragraph 3 of Ryu).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 7 is objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Jamal Javaid whose telephone number is 571-270-5137 and email address is Jamal.Javaid@uspto.gov.
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/JAMAL JAVAID/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2412
Prosecution Insights