Full uplink blanking to avoid RF impairments for devices with multiple connections

#The teachings in accordance with the exemplary embodiments of this invention relate generally to instructing a user equipment to not transmit an uplink signal that is determined to cause a problem with communications from the user equipment and, more specifically, relate to blanking or muting specific uplink time slots defined for a user equipment to cause the user equipment to not transmit the uplink signal on the specific uplink time slots to overcome the problem.

#This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.

#Certain abbreviations that may be found in the description and/or in the Figures are herewith defined as follows:

#The above and other aspects, features, and benefits of various embodiments of the present disclosure will become more fully apparent from the following detailed description with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which like reference signs are used to designate like or equivalent elements. The drawings are illustrated for facilitating better understanding of the embodiments of the disclosure and are not necessarily drawn to scale, in which:

#FIG. 1A shows Time Division Duplex patterns in LTE;

#FIG. 1B shows EUTRA-NR Dual Connectivity with single uplink operation;

#In accordance with example embodiments of the invention, there is proposed a method and apparatus to instruct a network device such as a user equipment to blank specific uplink time slots to prevent uplink signals from being transmitted on the specific uplink time slots determined to cause a problem for communications from the network device.

#Example embodiments of this invention addresses a cellular and mobile communication system such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) or new radio (NR). There are multiple methods proposed and also specified, where a UE simultaneously connects to multiple cells transmitting multiple uplink signals simultaneously. The example embodiments of the invention address LTE, but NR and other mobile communication system may also be covered.

#Concrete examples for simultaneous uplinks are: Carrier Aggregation (Rel11 LTE, Rel15 NR): the UE simultaneously transmits uplinks signals on multiple carriers to the same eNB/gNB; Dual Connectivity (Release 12 LTE, Rel15 EN-DC): the UE transmits multiple uplink signals on multiple carriers to two different eNBs/gNBs; Dual Connected handover (Release 16 LTE, Rel16 NR): there are at the time of this application two Release 16 work items for mobility enhancements, one for LTE and one for NR. One of the key targets is to reduce the handover interruption time to zero milliseconds (in NR), or at least as close as possible to 0 ms. This can only be achieved by setting up the target cell before detaching from the source cell. Hence, for a short time, the UE will be simultaneously connected to both, source and target cell.