Patent ID: 8520625

Claim:
A method comprising: selecting a first subset of antennas from a set of antennas for transmitting first information to a receiving device; transmitting the first information over the first subset of antennas; receiving one of an acknowledge (ACK) and a no acknowledge (NAK) from the receiving device indicating whether the first information was successfully received; storing a history of channel quality indicators received from the receiving device in the transmitter; in response to receiving the NAK, selecting a second subset of antennas from the set of antennas to retransmit the first information to the receiving device using the history of channel quality indicators received from the receiving device by comparing a threshold channel quality indicator to a best channel quality indicator in the history, the best channel quality indicator associated a best subset of the set of antennas; and if the best channel quality indicator is greater than the threshold channel quality indicator then selecting the best subset of the set of antennas as the second subset of antennas to retransmit the first information and if the best channel quality indicator is less than the threshold channel quality indicator then randomly selecting one of the subset of antennas as the second subset to retransmit the first information; and retransmitting the first information to the receiving device over the second subset of antennas.