Downlink control information (DCI) design for LTE devices

• US 9,955,465 B2
• Filed: 05/27/2015
• Issued: 04/24/2018
• 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
• Primary Examiner(s): Haile, Awet
• Application Number:
  US14/723,284
• Publication Number:
  US 20160100382A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,063 Days
• Field of Search: None
• 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 and the CIF includes Y bits, where Y=ceiling(log₂X)+1, where X is a number of the plurality of CCs scheduled by the single carrier but not including the 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 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.

4. The apparatus of claim 3, wherein a number of bits in the first CIF is larger than a number of bits in the second CIF.

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

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

7. 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 and the 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 (HARD) process number field.