LTE Patent Landscape for OFDM/MIMO Standards

Total of 211 patents, issued and published in the United States before Sept. 1, 2009, are analyzed for LTE OFDM/MIMO innovations. The lists of patents declared essential to LTE appear at the ETSI IPR Online are used in the analysis except for Motorola’s essential patent candidates. A keyword search is used for the identification of Motorola’s essential patent candidates.

To evaluate the quality of the LTE patents for OFDM/MIMO standards, patent disclosures for each essential patent candidate are compared to the technical specifications for LTE OFDM/MIMO standards (TS36.211 V8.70).

Qualcomm, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Nortel, Texas Instruments, InterDigital, Ericsson, ETRI, Nokia Siemens Networks, ETRI, Huawei, Sony, and NEC were the major LTE OFDM/MIMO IPR holders.

As for the most described field of technical specification, Down Link OFDM/MIMO (Section 6.3) was the top in the OFDM/MIMO essential patent candidates followed by PUCCH (Section 5.4) and PUSCH (Section 5.3).

As a measure for the essentiality of the candidates, Essentiality Index (EI) is evaluated:

EI : Criteria
E0 : Patent disclosure is nothing to do with LTE technical specifications
E1 : Patent disclosure is weakly related to LTE technical specifications
E2 : Patent disclosure is partially related to LTE technical specifications, but required further analysis
E3 : Patent disclosure is partially related to LTE technical specifications
E4 : Patent disclosure is related to LTE technical specifications overall
E5 : Patent disclosure is strongly related to LTE technical specifications

51 % of the LTE OFDM/MIMO essential patent candidates are classified as E2, E1, and E0.

49% of the LTE OFDM/MIMO essential patent candidates are classified as high value of EI for the essentiality.


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