ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,309,731, issued on May 20, was assigned to QUALCOMM Inc. (San Diego).

"Timing and synchronization techniques for secure networks" was invented by Alberto Rico Alvarino (San Diego), Kazuki Takeda (Minato-ku, Japan), Peter Gaal (San Diego), Juan Montojo (San Diego), Le Liu (San Diego), Javier Rodriguez Fernandez (San Diego), Xiao Feng Wang (San Diego), Umesh Phuyal (San Diego) and Edward George Tiedemann Jr. (Concord, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described. A user equipment (UE) may monitor a set of time-frequency resources for one or more cell detection signals (CDS) ass...