Methods, Systems and Apparatus for Mitigating Wireless Connection Degradation Due To Wireless Charging

• US 20180351659A1
• Filed: 06/02/2017
• Published: 12/06/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 06/02/2017
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Apple Inc.
• Original Assignee: Apple Inc.
• Inventors: Nimmala, Srinivasan, Gurumoorthy, Sethuraman, Venkataraman, Vijay, Ramamurthi, Vijay Kumar, Lovlekar, Srirang A., Kavuri, Lakshmi N., Baek, Sang Ho, Zhu, Yifan, Anantharaman, Karthik, Nallandigal, Rangakrishna, Kodali, Sree Ram, Kumar, Adesh, Wang, Xin, Al-Shemali, Eyad, Jing, Xiangpeng, Ganesan, Sivaramachandran, Xing, Longda, Shi, Jianxiong, Almalfouh, Sami M., Ji, Zhu, Sebeni, Johnson O., Wang, Beibei, Arora, Sunny
• Granted Patent: US 10,673,541 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: H02J 50/70 involving the reduction of electric, magnetic or electromagnetic leakage fields
• CPC Class Codes: H04B 1/10 Means associated with receiver for limiting or suppressing noise or interference
• CPC Class Codes: H04B 15/02 Reducing interference from electric apparatus by means located at or near the interfering apparatus
• CPC Class Codes: H04B 5/24 Inductive coupling
• CPC Class Codes: H04B 5/79 for data transfer in combination with power transfer

Abstract

Methods, systems and apparatus for a user equipment to mitigate interference in a wireless charging state. The user equipment may determine when the user equipment enters a wireless charging state and, when the user equipment enters the wireless charging state, activate an interference mitigation. The user equipment may further determine when the UE exits the wireless charging state and, when the user equipment exits the wireless charging state, deactivate the interference mitigation.

Claims

1. A method, comprising:

at a user equipment (“

UE”

);

determining that the UE is in a wireless charging state;

in response to determining that the UE is in the wireless charging state, activating an interference mitigation, the interference mitigation comprising altering an operation of the UE related to a network connection of the UE;

determining that the UE exits the wireless charging state; and

in response to determining that the UE exits the wireless charging state, deactivating the interference mitigation.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the activating of the interference mitigation is further based on whether the UE is connected to a cellular network.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the interference mitigation comprises altering one of a threshold of a connection parameter, an access barring factor, a cell selection criteria, an out of service (“

OOS”

) recovery scan rate, a duration of an onDuration of a discontinuous reception (“

DRX”

) cycle, an amount of physical broadcasting channel (“

PBCH”

) decoding attempts, a threshold of a panic search and measurement state, a search and measurement window duration, a ceiling of a maximum transmission power limit of the UE, a search length duration or a threshold triggering advanced receiver functions.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the interference mitigation is altering the connection parameter and the connection parameter comprises one of a connection establishment failure, a connected state radio link failure (“

RLF”

) or a system information block (“

SIB”

) decode failure.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the interference mitigation comprises one of deactivating a motion sensor based searching, deactivating a broadcast control channel (“

BCCH”

) read early timeout, deactivating UMTS cell avoidance, deactivating a micro-sleep function, deactivating a physical downlink control channel Only (“

PDCCH-Only”

) mode, deactivating a limiting of scheduling requests, deactivating a limiting of channel quality index (“

CQI”

) carryover, deactivating a limiting of uplink hybrid automatic repeat (“

HARQ”

) requests, deactivating an optimization of a downlink carrier aggregation (“

DL-CA”

) small cell measurement, deactivating a frame early termination (“

FET”

) for a paging channel (“

PCH”

) or a paging indicator channel (“

PICH”

) or enabling one or more additional diversity antennas.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the interference mitigation comprises performing one of a quick scan, a fast mode measurement or a fingerprint function.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

in response to the UE exiting the wireless charging state, activating a further interference mitigation.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein the further interference mitigation includes one of a quick scan, a removing of a throttling timer, or a high priority public land mobile network (“

HP-PLMN”

) scan.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the interference mitigation comprises removing one of a radio access technology (“

RAT”

), a cell or a frequency from a deprioritized list.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the deactivating the interference mitigation comprises restoring a value from a wireless charging state value to a wireless non-charging state value.

21. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

determining a level of interference at the UE;

determining the level of interference is above a predefined threshold; and

in response to determining the level of interference is above the predefined threshold, initiating a further interference mitigation.

11. A user equipment (“

UE”

), comprising;

a transceiver configured to connect to a base station of a network; and

a processor configured to;

determine that the UE is in a wireless charging state; and

in response to determining that the UE is in the wireless charging state, activate an interference mitigation the interference mitigation comprising altering an operation of the UE related to a network connection of the UE.

12. The UE of claim 11, wherein the processor is further configured to:

determine when the UE exits the wireless charging state; and

deactivate the interference mitigation when it is determined that the UE exited the wireless charging state.

13. The UE of claim 12, wherein when the UE exits the wireless charging state, the processor is further configured to activate a further interference mitigation, the further mitigation includes one of a quick scan, a removing of a throttling timer, or a high priority public land mobile network (“

HP-PLMN”

) scan.

14. The UE of claim 11, wherein the processor is further configured to activate the interference mitigation based on whether the UE is connected to a cellular network.

15. The UE of claim 11, wherein the interference mitigation comprises altering one of a threshold of a connection parameter, an access barring factor, a cell selection criteria, an out of service (“

OOS”

) recovery scan rate, a duration of an onDuration of a discontinuous reception (“

DRX”

) cycle, an amount of physical broadcasting channel (“

PBCH”

) decoding attempts, a threshold of a panic search and measurement state, a search and measurement window duration, a ceiling of a maximum transmission power limit of the UE, a search length duration or a threshold triggering advanced receiver functions.

16. The UE of claim 11, wherein the interference mitigation comprises one of deactivating a motion sensor based searching, deactivating a broadcast control channel (“

BCCH”

) read early timeout, deactivating UMTS cell avoidance, deactivating a micro-sleep function, deactivating a physical downlink control channel Only (“

PDCCH-Only”

) mode, deactivating a limiting of scheduling requests, deactivating a limiting of channel quality index (“

CQI”

) carryover, deactivating a limiting of uplink hybrid automatic repeat (“

HARQ”

) requests, deactivating an optimization of a downlink carrier aggregation (“

DL-CA”

) small cell measurement, deactivating a frame early termination (“

FET”

) for a paging channel (“

PCH”

) or a paging indicator channel (“

PICH”

) or enabling one or more additional diversity antennas.

17. The UE of claim 11, wherein the interference mitigation comprises performing one of a quick scan, a fast mode measurement or a fingerprint function.

18. The UE of claim 11, wherein the interference mitigation comprises removing one of a radio access technology (“

RAT”

), a cell or a frequency from a deprioritized list.

19. (canceled)

20. An integrated circuit, comprising:

circuitry to determine when a user equipment (“

UE”

) enters a wireless charging state;

circuitry to activate an interference mitigation when it is determined that the UE entered the wireless charging state, the interference mitigation comprising altering an operation of the UE related to a network connection of the UE, the network connection being affected by the wireless charging state;

circuitry to determine when the UE exits the wireless charging state; and

circuitry to deactivate the interference mitigation when it is determined that the UE exited the wireless charging state.