Patent ID: 7096041

Claim:
A method for beam formation in a radio communication system with subscriber stations and a base station, the base station having an antenna system with a plurality of antenna elements which radiate a downlink signal weighted in each case with coefficients w i of an actual weighting vector w, where i=1, . . . , M, comprising: at a subscriber station in an initialization phase thereof, producing a first spatial covariance matrix of a received downlink signal, based on averaging over a plurality of time slots of the received downlink signal, obtaining eigenvectors of the first spatial covariance matrix, and transferring the eigenvectors to the base station as initial weighting vectors for storage in memory; at the subscriber station in a working phase thereof, repeatedly selecting a dominant weighting vector from the initial weighting vectors, and conveying an identifier of the dominant weighting vector to the base station; and at the base station in the working phase, selecting the dominant weighting vector from among at least the initial weighting vectors stored in memory during the initialization phase of the subscriber station, and using the dominant weighting vector to form a direction of emission.