T 1018/12 - Added matter and inventive step

Key points

• In this brief decision in an examination appeal, the Board first finds that claim 1 involves added matter because of an added feature.
• The Board then examines inventive step of the claims without that feature, finding the claim to be obvious.
• As a comment, the legal basis for doing so is not immediately clear to me. 

EPO T 1018/12 -  link

Reasons for the Decision

1. The appeal is admissible.

2. Article 123(2) EPC

The board agrees with the decision under appeal that the wording "...the channel quality indicator output of the correlator being independent of a rate at which a symbol is repeated in the sequence of received symbols", present in the independent claims, has no support, explicit or even implicit, in the application documents as originally filed.

3. Article 56 EPC

3.1 For the following assessment of inventive step, the added feature mentioned in section 2 has not been taken into consideration. Moreover, the term "indirectly" added in the independent claims for defining the type of channel quality measurement is vague and could equally be applied to the quality measurement disclosed in D1 and D2.

[] In the board's view, D2 represents the closest prior art to the subject-matter of claim 1, since it relates to a channel quality measurement apparatus having the same aim, namely to adapt the coding and modulation scheme at the transmitter.

The difference between the subject-matter of claim 1 and the disclosure of D2 is that the channel quality indicator in claim 1 is the result of the correlation between the soft decoded symbol sequence and the re-encoded symbol sequence, and not based on a Viterbi metric as in D2.

The technical effect of this distinguishing feature is that the channel quality indicator is an easily implementable measurement of the overall channel quality, not just of one factor such as the SIR.

The objective technical problem can thus be formulated as how to calculate an alternative, reliable channel quality indicator.

In the board's view, the skilled person would be aware of document D1 and would obviously consider combining documents D1 and D2 and implementing the channel quality measurement disclosed in D1 in the adaptive system of D2.

Therefore the board judges that the subject-matter of claim 1 does not involve an inventive step (Article 56 EPC), having regard to the disclosure of D2 in combination with D1.

3.3 Independent claims 4 and 17 correspond to claim 1 in terms of a method claim and a computer program claim, respectively, with the feedback feature omitted. Thus, they too do not meet the requirements of Article 56 EPC.

Order

For these reasons it is decided that:

The appeal is dismissed.