Patent ID: 7463867

Claim:
An arrangement that includes at least a receiver with a plurality of antennas B responsive to signals transmitted from a transmitter with a plurality of antennas A, which signals pass through a transmission channel, where the receiver includes decoding circuitry that decodes information received by antennas B in each frame of a flow of frames, the improvement comprising: processing-and-communication circuitry that processes the signals received in each frame of the flow of frames to determine nature of information that is to be sent by the transmitter in the immediately following frame, and transmits a rate-adaptation instruction to the transmitter that specifies the nature of information that is to be sent by the transmitter in the immediately following frame; where the decoding circuitry and the processing-and-communication circuitry are adapted to process frame signals that include information in a training sequence field, a payload field, a payload validation field, and a control field; where the processing-and-communication circuitry computes a selected measure of goodness for each frame of the flow of frames, and constructs the rate-adaptation instruction based on the validation field information and the selected measure of goodness; and where the rate adaptation instruction relates to (a) number of data streams that are to be sent by the transmitter's antennas A, (b) modulation method used by the transmitter, (c) coding scheme used by the transmitter, or/and (d) coding rate used by the transmitter.