Apple Inc.

Laxminarayana Pillutla

Sharad Deepak Sambhwani

Dirk Nickisch

Digvijay Arjunrao Jadhav

Gil Katzir

Dawei Zhang

Huaning Niu

Yang Tang

Jie Cui

Manasa Raghavan

Qiming Li

Xiang Chen

Mithat C Dogan

Boqiang Fan

Mark G Forbes

Techniques for beam width control, and devices and components including apparatus, systems, and methods for beam width control are described herein.

Beam width control

Protocol for beam width control

An electronic device may include a set of antenna panels (APs) that transmit and receive signals within a set of signal beams. A proximity sensor such as a radar sensor may gather sensor data indicative of the position an external object. The device may select an AP and a beam that maximize wireless performance in communicating with a base station while also complying with the radio-frequency exposure (RFE). The device may select the AP and the beam based on the sensor data, per-panel and per-beam projected RFE values, antenna port RFE characteristics, per-panel and per-beam transmit power limits, per-beam transmit power backoffs, an RFE lookup table, regulatory RFE limits, and antenna performance metrics. The device may transmit an RFE report to the base station that identifies some or all of this information for use in updating scheduling for the device.

Radio-frequency exposure beam management and selection in communications systems

An electronic device may include a first set of radios subject to a specific absorption rate (SAR) limit and a second set of radios subject to a maximum permissible exposure (MPE) limit over an averaging period. Control circuitry may dynamically adjust radio-frequency (RF) exposure metric budgets provided to the radios over the averaging period, based on feedback reports from the radios identifying the amount of SAR and MPE consumed by the radios during different subperiods of the averaging period. The control circuitry may distribute and adjust SAR budgets and MPE budgets across the radios based on the feedback reports, distribution policies, radio statuses, transmit activity factors, and/or usage ratios associated with the radios. This may provide efficient utilization of the total available SAR and MPE budget, thereby leading to increased uplink coverage and throughput relative to scenarios where the SAR and MPE budgets remain static.

Electronic devices with hierarchical management of radio-frequency exposure

Triggering an uplink (UL) gap at a base station may include decoding a user equipment (UE) UL gap capability report received from a UE. A radio resource control (RRC) UL gap configuration for transmission to the UE may be encoded. The RRC UL gap configuration may include configuration information associated with at least one of a periodicity, offset, or length. Measurement information received from the UE may be decoded. The measurement information may include at least one of a power headroom value, a Pvalue, or a P value. Based on the power headroom value, the Pvalue, or the P value, the UL gap configuration may be activated by encoding a medium access control (MAC) control element (MAC CE) for transmission to the UE.

Methods of type 1 UL gap triggering in FR2

An electronic device may include a radio that generates a first maximum power based on a radio-frequency exposure (RFE) budget. The radio may transmit signals subject to the first maximum power during a subperiod of an averaging period and may generate an instantaneous RFE metric value based on an antenna coefficient and the conducted transmit power of the antenna during the subperiod. The radio may generate a consumed RFE value by averaging the instantaneous RFE metric value with previous instantaneous RFE values from the averaging period, may generate a remaining budget based on the consumed RFE value, may generate a second maximum transmit power based on the remaining budget, and may transmit signals during a subsequent subperiod subject to the second maximum power. Time-averaging the RFE metric may serve to optimize performance of the radio relative to scenarios where the radio performs time-averaging of conducted TX power.

Electronic devices with time domain radio-frequency exposure averaging

Activating an uplink (UL) gap at a base station may include decoding a user equipment (UE) UL gap capability report received from a UE. A radio resource control (RRC) UL gap configuration may be encoded for transmission to the UE. A power headroom report (PHR) medium access control (MAC) control element (CE) received from the UE may be decoded. The PHR MAC CE may include at least one of a P value or a power management maximum power reduction (P-MPR) value. Decoding the measurement information may include determining that the P value is equal to one or the P-MPR value is greater than zero. Based on determining that the P value is equal to one or the P-MPR value is greater than zero, the UL gap configuration may be implicitly activated.

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San Diego, CA, United States of America

Laxminarayana Pillutla