Patent ID: 8705392

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 together by the base station on the at least one sub-band and a suggested rank (r); 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 co-scheduled together by the base station on the at least one sub-band and the suggested rank (r) in accordance with at least one of single-user scheduling rules or multi-user scheduling rules; and transmitting to the base station an indication of the one or more signal quality measures and at least one tag identifying each signal quality measure as being determined in accordance with the single-user scheduling rules or the multi-user scheduling rules.