ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,309,874, issued on May 20, was assigned to QUALCOMM Inc. (San Diego).

"Conditional release of soft resources in an integrated access and backhaul network" was invented by Navid Abedini (Basking Ridge, N.J.), Jianghong Luo (Skillman, N.J.), Luca Blessent (Whitehouse Station, N.J.), Muhammad Nazmul Islam (Littleton, Mass.), Karl Georg Hampel (Jersey City, N.J.), Tao Luo (San Diego) and Junyi Li (Fairless Hills, Pa.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In some aspects, a node may configure whether a set of soft time resources is to be conditionally released or unconditionally released. The set of soft time resources may be configurable in a sched...