Patent ID: 7925302

Claim:
A wireless apparatus comprising: multi-antenna receive diversity unit comprising a plurality of receivers that process a plurality of received signals when multi-antenna receive diversity mode is enabled; and control unit coupled to the multi-antenna receive diversity unit that generates at least one network capacity indicator that measures allocation of at least one network resource and at least one quality indicator that measures performance of a traffic link of the wireless apparatus on the network, and that controls application of the multi-antenna receive diversity mode based on the network capacity indicator and the quality indicator, the control unit determines the at least one quality indicator by decoding input symbols to generate decoded symbols, re-coding the decoded symbols to generate an estimate, generating a comparison between the estimate and the input symbols, and generating an error rate as the at least one quality indicator, the control unit controlling application of the multi-antenna receive diversity operation based on the generated error rate and control unit coupled to the multi-antenna receive diversity unit that monitors state information regarding operation of whether the wireless apparatus is operating in an idle state or a connected state and controls application of the multi-antenna receive diversity operation in accordance with the operating state, wherein the control unit controls application of the multi-antenna receive diversity as a function of the instantaneous frame error of control channel messages when the wireless apparatus is operating in the idle state, and controls application of the multi-antenna receive diversity as a function of a data rate control message value when the wireless apparatus is operating in the connected state, the control unit comparing the data rate control message value with one or more thresholds to determine whether to apply multi-antenna receive diversity in the connected state, the control unit employing a different set of thresholds for each of data and voice traffic.