DOWNLINK CONTROL INFORMATION (DCI) DESIGN FOR LTE DEVICES

• US 20160100382A1
• Filed: 05/27/2015
• Published: 04/07/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 10/03/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Apple Inc.
• Original Assignee: Intel IP Corporation (Intel Corporation)
• Inventors: He, Hong, Fwu, Jong-kae, Han, Seunghee, Kwon, Hwan-joon
• Granted Patent: US 9,955,465 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 5/001 the frequencies being arranged in component carriers
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 5/0044 allocation of payload
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 5/0055 Physical resource allocation for ACK/NACK for physical mapping arrangements in ARQ protocols H04L1/1861
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 5/0094 Indication of how sub-channels of the path are allocated
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 28/06 Optimizing the usage of the radio link, e.g. header compression, information sizing , discarding information system modifying transmission characteristic according to link quality by modifying frame length H04L1/0007; dynamic adaptation of the packet size for flow control or congestion control H04L47/365
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 72/12 Wireless traffic scheduling
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 72/23 in the downlink direction of a wireless link, i.e. towards a terminal
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 84/042 Public Land Mobile systems, e.g. cellular systems

Abstract

Compact Downlink Control Information (DCI) format designs reduced the overhead of Physical Downlink Control Channels (PDCCHs) are provided. The compact DCI format designs may include using the extended RBGs size reduces the Resource Block Assignment (RBA) field of DCI; using modified format of extended Carrier Indicator Field (CIF) field supports numerous Component Carriers (CCs); making several CC-specific information field within DCI formats be common achieves a fast CCs activation/deactivation; and one or multiple DCI contents which need to be applied for different CCs are concatenated in a DCI.

Claims

1. An apparatus comprising:

generator circuitry to generate downlink control information (DCI), according to a DCI format, that includes a carrier indicator field (CIF);

transmitter circuitry, coupled with the generator circuitry, to transmit the DCI according to the DCI format to a user equipment (UE),

wherein the CIF is to schedule a plurality of component carriers (CCs) with a single carrier.

2. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the CIF is configured through higher-layer signaling, determined according to a number of configured CCs, or determined according to a number of CCs scheduled by the single carrier.

3. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the CIF includes Y bits, where Y=ceiling(log₂ X)+1, where X is a number of the plurality of CCs scheduled by the single carrier but not including the single carrier.

4. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the UE is a first UE, the DCI is first DCI, the DCI format is first DCI format, the CIF is first CIF, and the generator circuitry is further to generate second DCI, according to a second DCI format, that includes a second CIF;

and

the transmitter circuitry is to transmit the second DCI according to the second DCI to a second UE.

5. The apparatus of claim 4, wherein a number of bits in the first CIF is larger than a number of bits in the second CIF.

6. The apparatus of claim 4, wherein the first CIF includes a plurality of bits that are generated by a combination of bits of a legacy CIF field and a most significant bit (MSB) of a Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARM) process number field.

7. The apparatus of claim 4, wherein the second DCI format is one of standard DCI formats used in 3GPP Release 12 LTE system.

8. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the number of bits in the CIF is larger than 3.

9. A tangible machine-readable medium having stored thereon instructions that, when executed by a machine, cause the machine to:

generate first downlink control information (DCI) according to a first DCI format and second DCI according to a second DCI format, the first DCI format to include a first resource block assignment (RBA) field having a plurality of bits corresponding to a first resource block group (RBG) size, and the second DCI format to include a second RBA field having a plurality of bits corresponding to a second RBG size;

transmit the first DCI according to the first DCI format to a first user equipment (UE), and the second DCI according to the second DCI format to a second UE;

wherein the first RBG size is larger than the second RBG size, and a number of bits in the first RBA field is smaller than a number of bits in the second RBA field.

10. The tangible machine-readable medium of claim 9, wherein a number of the plurality of bits in the first RBA field is determined based on a number of configured component carriers (CCs) for joint grant by the first DCI format.

11. The tangible machine-readable medium of claim 10, wherein the number of configured CCs for joint grant by the first DCI format is configured by higher layers.

12. The tangible machine-readable medium of claim 9, wherein the first DCI format further comprises a carrier group indication field (CGIF) to indicate a CC group index scheduled by the first DCI format.

13. The tangible machine-readable medium of claim 9, wherein the first DCI format is further obtained by concatenation of multiple second DCI formats for a number of CCs configured by higher layers for joint grant by the first DCI format.

14. The tangible machine-readable medium of claim 9, wherein the first DCI format includes one or more common fields applied to one or more of a plurality of component carriers (CCs) configured by higher layers for joint grant by the first DCI format or scheduled by the first DCI format.

15. The tangible machine-readable medium of claim 14, wherein the one or more common fields comprise a Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARM) process number field, a Modulation and coding scheme (MCS) field, or Transmit Power Control (TPC) command field for physical uplink control channel (PUCCH).

16. The tangible machine-readable medium of claim 9, wherein the first RBG size is configured through higher layer signaling;

is a function of the second RBG size;

is an integer multiple of the second RBG size;

is determined based on the downlink system bandwidth for the first UE;

is determined based on a downlink system bandwidth for the second UE;

is given by scaling the second RBG size by a number of component carriers (CCs) configured for joint grant by the first DCI format;

is given by scaling the second RBG size by a number of CCs scheduled by the first DCI format;

is given by scaling the second RBG size by a ratio of total available resource block numbers of configured CCs for joint grant by the first DCI format to the number of resource blocks valid for the second DCI format;

or is given by scaling the second RBG size by a ratio of total available resource block numbers of scheduled CCs by the first DCI format to the number of resource blocks valid for the second DCI format according to a given system bandwidth.

17. The tangible machine-readable medium of claim 9, wherein the second DCI format is a standard DCI format used in 3GPP Release 12 LTE system.

18. A user equipment (UE) comprising:

signal processing circuitry to receive and decode a compact Downlink Control Information (DCI) according to a compact DCI format on a Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH); and

data or control processing circuitry coupled with the signal processing circuitry,

the data or control processing circuitry to detect information associated with a serving cell based on the received compact DCI;

wherein the compact DCI format is generated by jointly encoding a plurality of first DCIs having a first DCI format.

19. The UE of claim 18, wherein the first DCI format is a standard DCI format used in 3GPP Release 12 LTE system.

20. The UE of claim 18, wherein the compact DCI format includes a plurality of information fields and is generated by jointly encoding common parts of a plurality of information fields in the plurality of first DCIs.

21. The UE of claim 18, wherein the compact DCI format includes one or more resource block assignment (RBA) fields, at least one of the one or more RBA fields to be shared by a group of component carriers (CCs) configured by higher layers.

22. The UE of claim 21, wherein each of said one or more RBA fields in the compact DCI format corresponds to a first resource block group (RBG), and a plurality of second RBGs scheduled by a group of CCs are combined into the first RBG;

and wherein individual second RBGs of the plurality of second RBGs are scheduled by individual CCs of a group of CCs.

23. The UE of claim 18, wherein the compact DCI format includes one RBA field and a size of the one RBA field depends on a number of scheduled CCs by the compact DCI format.

24. The UE of claim 18, wherein the signal processing circuitry is further configured to:

receive a third DCI according to a third DCI format, in scheduling cell UE-Specific Search Space (USS), the third DCI format to include an information field to indicate the presence of scheduling information in the compact DCI format for CCs among multiple CCs scheduled by the compact DCI;

wherein a size of the third DCI format is same as a size of a standard DCI format used in 3GPP Release 12 LTE system.