Patent Issued for Transmission of Multiple ACK/NAK Bits with Data

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Journal of Engineering -- A patent by the inventors Shen, Zukang (Richardson, TX); Jiang, Jing (Allen, TX); Muharemovic, Tarik (Dallas, TX), filed on March 4, 2009, was cleared and issued on December 18, 2012, according to news reporting originating from Alexandria, Virginia, by VerticalNews correspondents.

Patent number 8335165 is assigned to Texas Instruments Incorporated (Dallas, TX).

The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: "FIG. 1 shows an exemplary wireless telecommunications network 100. The illustrative telecommunications network includes base stations 101, 102 and 103, though in operation, a telecommunications network necessarily includes many more base stations. Each of base stations 101, 102 and 103 are operable over corresponding coverage areas 104, 105 and 106. Each base station's coverage area is further divided into cells. In the illustrated network, each base station's coverage area is divided into three cells. Handset or other user equipment (UE) 109 is shown in Cell A 108. Cell A 108 is within coverage area 104 of base station 101. Base station 101 transmits to and receives transmissions from UE 109. As UE 109 moves out of Cell A 108 and into Cell B 107, UE 109 may be handed over to base station 102. Because UE 109 is synchronized with base station 101, UE 109 can employ non-synchronized random access to initiate handover to base station 102.

"Non-synchronized UE 109 also employs non-synchronous random access to request allocation of up-link 111 time or frequency or code resources. If UE 109 has data ready for transmission, which may be traffic data, measurements report, tracking area update, UE 109 can transmit a random access signal on up-link 111. The random access signal notifies base station 101 that UE 109 requires up-link resources to transmit the UE's data. Base station 101 responds by transmitting to UE 109 via down-link 110, a message containing the parameters of the resources allocated for UE 109 up-link transmission along with a possible timing error correction. After receiving the resource allocation and a possible timing advance message transmitted on down-link 110 by base station 101, UE 109 optionally adjusts its transmit timing and transmits the data on up-link 111 employing the allotted resources during the prescribed time interval.

"FIG. 2 shows the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) time division duplex (TDD) Frame Structure. Different subframes are allocated for downlink (DL) or uplink (UL) transmissions. Table 1 shows applicable DL/UL subframe allocations.

"TABLE-US-00001 TABLE 1 Configu- Switch-point Subframe number ration periodicity 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 5 ms D S U U U D S U U U 1 5 ms D S U U D D S U U D 2 5 ms D S U D D D S U D D 3 10 ms D S U U U D D D D D 4 10 ms D S U U D D D D D D 5 10 ms D S U D D D D D D D 6 10 ms D S U U U D S U U D

"One interesting property of TDD is that the number of UL and DL subframes can be different. In the configurations where there are more DL subframes than UL subframes, multiple DL subframes are associated with one single UL subframe for transmission of corresponding control signal. For example, for each dynamically scheduled transmission in the DL subframes, acknowledge and non-acknowledge (ACK/NAK) bits need to be transmitted in an associated UL subframe to support proper hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) operation. If UE 109 is scheduled in a multiple of DL subframes all of which are associated with one single UL subframe, UE 109 needs to transmit multiple ACK/NAK bits in that single UL subframe."

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent, VerticalNews journalists also obtained the inventors' summary information for this patent: "This invention is a method of wireless communication having a communications protocol providing more downlink subframes than uplink subframes. The user equipment detects within a frame a plurality of downlink communications, producing either an acknowledge (ACK) response signal or a non-acknowledge (NAK) response signal for each detected downlink communication and transmits a combination of a plurality of ACK/NAK response signals and related data from the mobile user's equipment to a base station.

"The related data could be the number of bits N of the plurality of ACK/NAK response signals or the number of detected downlink communications S requiring ACK/NAK response signals. The plural ACK/NAK signals could be coded after production and before transmission. The coding could include block coding, convolutional coding and turbo coding.

"The user equipment could produce a cyclical redundancy check set of bits of the ACK/NAK signals for transmission. The cyclical redundancy check bits could be scrambled for transmission dependent upon the numbers N or S. As an example, an even number would use a first value for scrambling and an odd number would use a second value for scrambling. Similar selections are feasible with resource elements or an index of a modulation symbol or codeword.

"The N bits of the plurality of ACK/NAK response signals could be compressed into M bits where 0<M<N. In a preferred embodiment M is predetermined."

URL and more information on this patent, see: Shen, Zukang; Jiang, Jing; Muharemovic, Tarik. Transmission of Multiple ACK/NAK Bits with Data. U.S. Patent Number 8335165, filed March 4, 2009, and issued December 18, 2012. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=28&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1372&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=20121218.PD.&OS=ISD/20121218&RS=ISD/20121218

Keywords for this news article include: Telecommunications, Texas Instruments Incorporated.

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