ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,313,756, issued on May 27, was assigned to QUALCOMM Inc. (San Diego).

"Techniques for establishing directional communications via a configurable reflective surface" was invented by Sourjya Dutta (San Diego), Junyi Li (Fairless Hills, Pa.), Kapil Gulati (Belle Mead, N.J.), Navid Abedini (Basking Ridge, N.J.), Shuanshuan Wu (San Diego), Anantharaman Balasubramanian (San Diego) and Preeti Kumari (San Diego).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "This disclosure provides systems, methods and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for establishing directional communications between two communication nodes via a confi...