Patent ID: 7257425

Claim:
A smart external antenna module system for retrofitting an existing wireless system, comprising: a plurality of antennas, said plurality of antennas receiving input signals; means for performing beamforming by generating weights for combining said input signals received from said plurality of antennas; means for receiving a signal to be transmitted from said smart antenna system; means for operating said smart antenna system in a receive mode until receipt of said signal to be transmitted from said smart antenna system; means for operating at least one of said antennas in a transmit mode after receipt of said signal to be transmitted; and means for coupling said smart antenna system to a single external port of a single transceiver wherein said means for coupling said smart antenna system to a single external port of a single transceiver comprises a physical connection wherein said physical connection is a single coaxial cable connection, whereby an antenna array can attach to an external port of a transceiver without any modification of the transceiver; wherein the transceiver is a wireless LAN access point (AP) wherein said means for performing beamforming is at least one of the following: means for using maximal ratio combining wherein each signal is weighted and combined to maximize the output signal-to-noise ratio by computing beamforming weights wherein beamforming weights are the complex conjugate of the channel transfer characteristics whereby the smart external antenna module will maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of any received signal and demodulation of the received signal is not required; means for equal gain combining, whereby the signals are co-phased but the gain is the same for each antenna; and means for maximizing the output power with normalized weights, and wherein the smart external antenna module system further comprises: a filter coupled to each said plurality of antennas, each of said filters receiving signals from one of said plurality of antennas.