Patent ID: 8270512

Claim:
A method, implemented by a transmitter, of allocating sub-carrier level resources, the method comprising: configuring the transmitter with a plurality of transmit antenna circuits, each transmit antenna circuit including a sub-carrier modulation unit, a sub-carrier transmit power control (TPC) unit and a transmit antenna connected in series; using a channel estimator residing in the transmitter to calculate a channel metric for each of the transmit antenna circuits; using a controller residing in the transmitter and in communication with the channel estimator and the transmit antenna circuits to select a subset of the transmit antenna circuits; using the controller to determine whether to allocate all, a subset or none of a plurality of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) sub-carriers for each of the selected transmit antenna circuits based on the channel metrics calculated by the channel estimator; using the selected transmit antenna circuits to adjust transmit power for each of the allocated OFDM sub-carriers; and using the selected transmit antenna circuits to transmit signals using the allocated OFDM sub-carriers.