ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 28 -- United States Patent no. 12,696,175, issued on July 28, was assigned to QUALCOMM Inc. (San Diego).

"Multi-link communication" was invented by Abhishek Pramod Patil (San Diego), George Cherian (San Diego), Alfred Asterjadhi (San Diego), Sai Yiu Duncan Ho (San Diego), Lochan Verma (Danville, Calif.) and Yanjun Sun (San Diego).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "This disclosure provides systems, methods, and apparatuses for associating a wireless communication device such as a wireless station (STA) of a STA multi-link device (MLD) with an access point (AP) MLD that includes a first AP associated with a first communication link of the AP MLD and includes one or more seconda...