Electronics patent of the month: Managing power outage at mobile base sites

GB Patent Number: GB2489145
Granted to: PowerOasis Limited

To date, when writing this series, I’ve always discussed patents and not patenting. What I mean by this is that I have told you about inventions which are described in some granted patents, but I’ve never explained much about what is required for a patent application to blossom into a granted patent. So here goes…

You can file a patent application for anything. As I often tell new clients, I could file a patent application today for the wheel, if I wanted to! However, patents are only granted for inventions which are both new and inventive. So who decides this?

In the UK, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) initially searches patent and other databases for documents that describe similar inventions. Once they have found relevant documents (the ‘cited prior art’) they will determine if the patent applicant’s invention is novel (new).

If the invention passes that first hurdle then a patent examiner will consider the question of whether it is inventive. And before you ask, a new invention is deemed inventive in the UK if the nominally skilled person in the field of technology of the invention would consider that the invention is not obvious in light of the cited prior art.

You may be wondering why I’m telling you all this now? Sometimes one comes across a patent which has been granted and your reaction is ‘oh, did they really grant a patent for that?’ At which point I remind myself, ‘as long as it’s novel and inventive, then why not!’

I had such a reaction when I came across UK patent no. 2489145. This patent was granted on 24 September 2014 to PowerOasis Limited and is entitled “Managing projected power outage at mobile radio base sites”.

I was so surprised when I read about this patent that I checked to see if any corresponding patent applications had been granted in other jurisdictions. I found that patent no. 8489154 was granted in the US with identical scope!

As mobile phone users, we are used to being able to make calls on our phones all, or at least most, of the time. A couple of weeks ago, however, my phone would not initiate a call to my dear wife. This was after I finished the glorious Royal Parks Half Marathon. Since there were so many people congregated around the finishing line, the cell served by the local base station was overloaded and there was no way of making a call at that time.

PowerOasis’s invention addresses this problem by using a power management method in the following way. The invention particularly relates to base stations in remote areas, without a mains power supply, which are powered by solar and/or wind sources.

The method goes as follows. Firstly, the availability of generated power at a mobile radio base station over a forthcoming interval of time is projected. This projection may be based on historic meteorological data for that geographical area.

Next, the power that will be consumed by loads at the site over the same period is projected, again based on historical data.

Finally, it is decided if the projected required power will be more than the projected generated power and takes ‘action’ to prolong the period for which the base station is able to operate. Such action may be raising an alarm to an operational service system or a modification of the operating behaviour of the base station, such as shrinking the size of the cell or modifying the system’s parameters for handing over a call to an adjacent cell.

In summary, the method predicts two values, compares them, and takes action if it doesn’t like the answer, which may seem pretty straightforward. Nevertheless if both the UK and the US patent offices have searched and examined the invention and found them to be novel, then who I am I to question this. After all it just goes to show how the simplest inventions are always the best.

For those of you with an interest, here is some ‘homework’ – for one of my favourite patents, try finding UK patent no. GB2406949B and look at the claims (at the end of the document).

Michael Jaeger is a patent attorney at leading UK patent and trade mark attorneys, Withers & Rogers LLP.