Patent ID: 8654663

Claim:
A method for determining attributes of communication channels of multi-user (MU)-multiple input multiple output (MIMO) users in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based multiple access (OFDMA) system, the method comprising: receiving from a base station, for at least one sub-band of contiguous sub-carriers, an indication of an estimate of or an upper-bound on a total number of streams (S) that are co-scheduled by the base station on the at least one sub-band; determining one or more signal quality measures for the at-least one sub-band based on the estimate of or the upper-bound on the total number of streams that are scheduled by the base station on the at least one sub-band; and transmitting to the base station an indication of the one or more signal quality measures, wherein the signal quality measures are signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs) and wherein the indication is the determined SINRs.