Patent ID: 7457602

Claim:
A method, executed relative to signals of a current pair of antennas selected from a plurality of antennas, for replacing a first signal of said pair when said first signal falls below a predefined threshold, comprising the steps of: ranking each of said antennas relative to others of said antennas based on signal strength; creating antenna states that correspond to different pairs of said antennas; setting up, for each created antenna state, a first next state corresponding to when a new pair of antennas is formed by replacing an antenna of the pair that is of higher rank than the not-replaced antenna of the pair, and a second next state corresponding to when said new pair of antennas is formed by replacing an antenna of the pair that is of lower rank than the not-replaced antenna of the pair; selecting a next state in said one time cycle based on a determination whether said first signal is the higher rank antenna of said current pair, or is the lower rank antenna of said current pair; switching to a next antenna state, by selecting the antenna pair corresponding to the next antenna state, based on the results of said selecting step; and repeating said selecting step and said switching step for each time cycle for which communication exists.