US 10965425

Following a review of public records and the patent documentation for U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425, here is a summary of its key details and an analysis of its independent claims.

Patent Information:

• Title: Control information for multi-user transmissions in WLAN systems
• Current Assignee: Atlas Global Technologies LLC
• Inventors: Yujin Noh, Daewon Lee, Sungho Moon, Young Hoon Kwon
• Filing Date: June 21, 2019
• Issue Date: March 30, 2021
• Abstract: In wireless communications for multi-users, an access point may generate a first frame for allocating resources to a plurality of stations. The first frame may contain an indication as to whether a station(s) is allocated at least one of a set of resource units (RUs) of a plurality of RUs, such as a center 26-tone RU. The set of resource units may be based on a channel bandwidth of the wireless communications. The indication may be contained in a common block field of signal fields, such as a common block field of high efficiency (HE) signal content channel(s) of an HE signal field. The station(s) may receive the first frame and determine whether the one of the set of RUs is allocated. The station(s) may transmit a second frame to the access point based on resource allocation information in the first frame. Other methods, apparatus, and computer-readable media are also disclosed.

Litigation:

A review of available data indicates that U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425 has been asserted in litigation. A case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (Case 2:25-cv-00534). A search of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) dockets for 2026 did not yield any specific results for this patent at this time.

Plain-Language Summary of Independent Claims

This patent has two independent claims: claim 1, which describes a method, and claim 11, which describes an apparatus (a device) that carries out that method.

Claim 1: This claim outlines a method for a wireless device (referred to as a "station") to receive and interpret control information in a Wi-Fi network. Here's a simplified breakdown:

• The station receives a specific type of control signal called a "high efficiency signal B (HE-SIG-B) field."
• This HE-SIG-B field is divided into two main parts:
  1. A "common subfield" that contains general information for all devices in a group.
  2. A "station-specific subfield" that has information just for one particular device.
• The key innovation is that within the station-specific subfield, there is a "type" indicator. This "type" indicator tells the device how large its specific information block is. This allows the system to send different amounts of information to different devices in the same transmission.
• By reading this "type" indicator, the device can correctly determine the size and format of the rest of the information meant for it, even if other devices are receiving different types or amounts of information.

Claim 11: This claim describes the physical device, or "apparatus," that puts the method of claim 1 into practice. It essentially states that a wireless station is built with:

• A transceiver to send and receive the wireless signals, including the HE-SIG-B field.
• A processor (the "brains" of the device) that is programmed to:
  • Receive the HE-SIG-B signal.
  • Examine the "type" information within the part of the signal dedicated to that station.
  • Use that "type" information to figure out the size of its specific instructions.
  • Process the rest of the station-specific information accordingly.

In essence, this patent describes a more flexible and efficient way to send control information in a multi-user Wi-Fi environment by allowing for variable-sized information packets for each user, with a "type" field to tell each user's device how to read its specific packet.

Here is the known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425 as of May 1, 2026.

Based on a review of public records, U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425 has been asserted in the following case:

• Case Name: Atlas Global Technologies LLC v. TP-Link Corporation Limited et al.
• Plaintiff: Atlas Global Technologies LLC
• Defendants: TP-Link Corporation Limited, TP-Link International Limited, TP-Link USA Corporation, TP-Link Global Inc., and TP-Link Corporation
• Jurisdiction: U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas
• Case Number: 2:25-cv-00534
• Filing Date: The case was initiated in 2025.
• Status: The case is currently active. No resolution or final judgment has been entered as of the current date.

Proceedings overview

There are no AIA trial proceedings on file for U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425. This means the patent has not been subjected to IPR, PGR, or CBM trials at the USPTO. For a defendant, this indicates that all claims of the patent remain untested in an AIA trial setting, leaving all prior art grounds potentially available for future challenge.

Strategic summary

As of May 15, 2026, all claims of U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425 remain untested in AIA trial proceedings. This means that claims 1-19, as granted, are all "SUSTAINED" in the sense that they have not been challenged or invalidated via IPR, PGR, or CBM. The patent has not been narrowed through any PTAB trials.

The absence of any PTAB proceedings means there is no estoppel landscape under § 315(e)(2) for any potential petitioner. All prior-art grounds, whether previously considered by the USPTO examiner or not, remain available for a defendant to assert in a new AIA trial petition. There is no pattern of filings by petitioners, nor any appeals history by the patent owner, as no proceedings have taken place.

Recommended next steps

Since there is no PTAB activity for U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425, any defendant facing assertion of this patent should consider initiating an AIA trial, such as an Inter Partes Review (IPR), if relevant prior art can be identified. The absence of prior PTAB challenges suggests that the patent's claims have not been rigorously tested against prior art in this forum, which could be a significant advantage for a challenger.

Inventors

• Yujin Noh (Newracom Inc.)
• Daewon Lee (Newracom Inc.)
• Sungho Moon (Newracom Inc.)
• Young Hoon Kwon (Newracom Inc.)

All inventors were employed by the original assignee, Newracom Inc., at the time of filing. There is no unusual pattern of inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing.

Original assignee

The original assignee named on the issued patent is Newracom Inc.

Newracom Inc. develops and provides Wi-Fi HaLow™ (IEEE 802.11ah) solutions, including SoCs (System on Chips) and modules for IoT applications. They ship products embodying claims related to wireless communication systems, particularly in the Wi-Fi HaLow space.

Newracom Inc. is currently operating.

Assignment timeline

• 2019-06-24 (executed) / recorded 2019-06-24 — Reel 049594/0972
  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: Moon, Sungho; Kwon, Young Hoon; Lee, Daewon; Noh, Yujin
  • Assignee: NEWRACOM, INC.
  • Correspondent: Suiter Swantz PC LLO, 14301 FNB Parkway, Suite 220, Omaha, NE 68154. This correspondent does not appear to recur in this chain.
  • Context: Transfer of inventor's interest to the original assignee.
• 2021-03-08 (executed) / recorded 2021-03-09 — Reel 056461/0898
  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: NEWRACOM, INC.
  • Assignee: ATLAS GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES LLC
  • Correspondent: NEAL, GERBER & EISENBERG LLP, 2 N. LASALLE STREET, SUITE 1700, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60602. This correspondent does not appear to recur in this chain.
  • Context: Transfer of patent from operating company to a licensing entity.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10965425
    2019 : Inventors assign to Newracom Inc
    2021 : Assigned to Atlas Global Technologies LLC
    2025 : First infringement suit filed

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — present. On 2021-03-08 (executed) / recorded 2021-03-09, Newracom Inc. assigned the patent to Atlas Global Technologies LLC (Reel 056461/0898). The name "Atlas Global Technologies LLC" with the "LLC" suffix is suggestive of a licensing-only entity. Public records indicate Atlas Global Technologies LLC is a known patent asserter.
2. Known asserter in the chain — present. Atlas Global Technologies LLC is a known patent asserter, having filed litigation against TP-Link Corporation Limited et al. in 2025 (Case 2:25-cv-00534).
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present. Different correspondents are listed for the two recorded assignments: Suiter Swantz PC LLO for the first and NEAL, GERBER & EISENBERG LLP for the second.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. There are only two assignments recorded, which does not indicate cascading transfers.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — present. The patent was assigned to Atlas Global Technologies LLC on 2021-03-08 (executed) / recorded 2021-03-09 (Reel 056461/0898). The first infringement suit was filed in 2025 (Case 2:25-cv-00534), which is more than 6 months after the assignment, but the transfer to a known NPE is a strong indicator of intent to assert.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. There is no indication that Newracom Inc. filed for bankruptcy.
7. Privateering — unclear. While the patent was transferred from an operating company (Newracom Inc.) to an NPE (Atlas Global Technologies LLC), there is no public information to definitively state whether Newracom Inc. is leveraging Atlas Global Technologies LLC to assert against competitors on its behalf.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain terminates with Atlas Global Technologies LLC, which is an asserting entity, not a defensive aggregator.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence

The transfer of the patent from an operating company (Newracom Inc.) to Atlas Global Technologies LLC (Reel 056461/0898), a known patent asserter, strongly indicates an NPE assertion pattern. This is further supported by the subsequent filing of an infringement suit by Atlas Global Technologies LLC.

USPTO Assignment Center search for US10965425

To identify the most relevant prior art for US Patent 10,965,425, I will access the patent's citations. The USPTO provides tools for searching patent information, including citations. I will use these tools to find the references cited within US10965425B2.

Prior Art Analysis for US Patent 10,965,425

As of April 26, 2026, a review of US Patent 10,965,425 and its cited references reveals the following potential prior art:

To be completed after I can retrieve the full list of cited references for US Patent 10,965,425. I cannot perform live lookups of specific patent citations within the USPTO database with the current tools. I can, however, provide a general methodology for how such an analysis would be performed once the citations are available.

General Methodology for Prior Art Analysis:

Once the list of cited patents and publications for US10965425B2 is obtained (e.g., from the "Cited by" or "References Cited" section of the patent document on the USPTO website), the following steps would be taken for each reference:

1. Full Citation: Record the complete citation information, including patent number, publication date, inventors, and assignee.
2. Publication/Filing Date: Note both the publication date (for patent documents) or filing date (for applications) to establish their priority date relative to US10965425B2.
3. Brief Description: Read the abstract and relevant sections of the cited prior art to understand its core inventive concept and how it relates to wireless communication systems, multi-user transmissions, WLAN, HE-SIG-B fields, resource allocation, and type indications for station-specific information size.
4. Potential Anticipation (35 U.S.C. § 102):
   • Direct Comparison: For each independent claim (claims 1 and 11) of US10965425B2, systematically compare every element of the claim to the disclosure of the prior art reference.
   • Element-by-Element Match: If a single prior art reference explicitly or inherently discloses every single element of an independent claim of US10965425B2, then that prior art reference potentially anticipates that claim under 35 U.S.C. § 102.
   • Focus on Key Features: Pay particular attention to elements related to:
     • Receiving an HE-SIG-B field.
     • The HE-SIG-B field comprising a common subfield and a station-specific subfield.
     • The station-specific subfield comprising a "type" indication.
     • The "type" indication identifying a size of the station-specific information.
     • A processor configured to perform these steps.
   • Document Findings: Clearly state which specific claim(s) (e.g., Claim 1, Claim 11) are potentially anticipated and provide a brief justification based on the identified disclosures in the prior art.

Without the specific list of prior art references, I cannot provide a detailed analysis of each, but this outlines the necessary process.

Obviousness Analysis under 35 U.S.C. § 103 for U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425

This analysis assesses the obviousness of U.S. Patent No. 10,965,425, titled "Control information for multi-user transmissions in WLAN systems," under 35 U.S.C. § 103, considering the prior art available before the patent's priority date of August 7, 2015. The independent claims, Claim 1 (method) and Claim 11 (apparatus), are the focus of this analysis. Both claims describe a wireless station receiving a High Efficiency Signal B (HE-SIG-B) field comprising a common subfield and at least one station-specific subfield. The core innovative element is a "type" indicator within the station-specific subfield, which determines the size of the remaining information within that same station-specific subfield.

A claim is obvious if "the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains." (35 U.S.C. § 103). To establish obviousness, there must be a motivation to combine prior art references, a reasonable expectation of success, and a nexus between the claimed invention and the motivation. This motivation can be found in the prior art itself, market forces, design incentives, or the knowledge and common sense of a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA).

Background in Prior Art

Prior to the priority date, the development of the IEEE 802.11ax (High Efficiency WLAN or HEW) standard was underway, introducing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) for multi-user transmissions. The HE-SIG-B field was an established component in these new WLAN systems, designed to carry control information for multi-user downlink transmissions.

Existing prior art, such as that described in US11405164B2, US9893784B2, and EP4369839B1, clearly demonstrates the concept of an HE-SIG-B field within a High Efficiency (HE) WLAN Physical Layer Convergence Procedure (PLCP) Protocol Data Unit (PPDU). These references indicate that the HE-SIG-B field is encoded separately from HE-SIG-A and carries Station (STA)-specific scheduling information, such as Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) values and Resource Unit (RU) allocation, enabling STAs to identify and decode their corresponding RUs in the data field. Furthermore, it was known that the HE-SIG-B field typically includes a common field and at least one STA-specific field. The HE-SIG-B field itself could be of variable length (N_HESIGB symbols) depending on the content, as indicated in the patent's own background description for US10965425 (Table in FIG. 6).

The problem of efficiently communicating diverse STA-specific control information in multi-user scenarios, where different STAs might require different amounts or types of information (e.g., SU-MIMO vs. MU-MIMO users), would have been apparent to a PHOSITA in the context of 802.11ax development. This is further suggested by EP4369839B1 which states that if the signaling structure of HE-SIG-B, designed for DL-MU transmission, is directly used in uplink narrowband transmission, signaling overhead may increase, implying a need for more efficient signaling methods.

Obviousness Combinations

Given the state of the art, a PHOSITA would have been motivated to develop more flexible and efficient ways to structure the STA-specific control information within the HE-SIG-B field to optimize overhead and adapt to varying STA requirements in multi-user transmissions.

Combination 1: General HE-SIG-B Structure (US11405164B2, US9893784B2, EP4369839B1) + Principles of Variable Information Lengths in Communication Protocols

1. Disclosure of Basic Elements: References such as US11405164B2, US9893784B2, and EP4369839B1 establish the fundamental architecture of the HE-SIG-B field, comprising a common subfield and STA-specific subfields, designed to carry scheduling and allocation information for multiple users in a WLAN system. They confirm that HE-SIG-B carries STA-specific scheduling information like MCS and RU allocation.
2. Motivation to Combine: The motivation to introduce a "type" indicator within the STA-specific subfield to define its size stems from the inherent need for efficiency and flexibility in multi-user communication protocols. Different types of users (e.g., single-user (SU) type, multi-user (MU) type, frequency repetition type, as noted in US10965425's detailed description) require different sets of control parameters. Transmitting a fixed-size STA-specific subfield for all users, regardless of their actual information needs, would lead to unnecessary overhead and inefficiency, especially when considering the varying demands of SU-MIMO, MU-MIMO, and OFDMA allocations. A PHOSITA would recognize that indicating the format or type of STA-specific information could allow for variable lengths, thereby reducing overhead.
3. Reasonable Expectation of Success: The concept of using a type or length indicator at the beginning of a data structure to define the format or size of subsequent information is a well-known and common practice in data communication protocols. For example, the L-SIG field itself contains information indicative of a data rate and a length, which is utilized by a receiver to calculate the time duration of a transmission (as described in the background of US10965425). Applying this established principle to a subfield within the HE-SIG-B field, specifically to the STA-specific portion, would be a predictable extension.

Combination 2: EP3139532A1 + General Communication Protocol Design Principles

1. Disclosure of Basic Elements: EP3139532A1, which shares a priority date of August 7, 2015, with US10965425, explicitly discusses different HE-SIG-B common field formats and indications. It mentions using a few bits in HE-SIG-A to indicate the format (or mode) of the common field, implying different lengths and definitions for the common field. This reference also mentions a one-bit middle-tone indicator included in the HE-SIG-B common field to indicate whether a 26-tone RU is used. While this reference focuses on the common field, it clearly introduces the idea of using indicators within HE-SIG fields to define formats and allocations.
2. Motivation to Combine: A PHOSITA, observing the need for flexible common field formats as described in EP3139532A1, would naturally extend this concept to the STA-specific fields. If the common field can have variable formats indicated by a 'format indicator' for efficiency, it would be logical and advantageous to apply a similar mechanism to individual STA-specific subfields. The problem of varying data requirements for different STA types (e.g., SU, MU) is directly analogous to the problem of varying common information requirements. Therefore, a motivation would exist to provide flexibility at the individual user level, not just the common field level, to further reduce overhead and improve efficiency.
3. Reasonable Expectation of Success: Given that EP3139532A1 already teaches the use of indicators for format and allocation within the HE-SIG-B context, implementing a similar "type" indicator within a STA-specific subfield to determine its size would be a straightforward application of known communication protocol design principles. The transition from indicating format/length of a common field to indicating format/length of a user-specific subfield would be a predictable design choice for a PHOSITA aiming to optimize signaling in multi-user transmissions.

Conclusion:

The independent claims of US10965425, specifically the use of a "type" indicator within a station-specific subfield of the HE-SIG-B field to determine the size of the remaining station-specific information, would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art by the priority date. The general structure of HE-SIG-B with common and user-specific fields was well-known in the IEEE 802.11ax development. The motivation to provide flexible and efficient control information in multi-user WLAN systems, accommodating diverse user types and reducing signaling overhead, would have driven a PHOSITA to adopt mechanisms for variable-length information fields. The established practice of using type or length indicators in communication protocols, as well as the explicit teaching in EP3139532A1 regarding format indications within the HE-SIG-B common field, would have provided the necessary tools and motivation to implement a similar type indicator within the station-specific subfield. This combination of existing knowledge and known design principles leads to a predictable outcome, rendering the claimed invention obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103.