Patent ID: 7031290

Claim:
A method for operating a wireless communications system for assigning system resources to users, comprising: within a coverage area of a base station (BS) having a multi-element antenna array having M elements, estimating a spatial signature vector (SSV) for a current subscriber station; using the estimated SSV as a weight vector, determining the output power that is correlated with a spreading code to be assigned by operating an M-branch receiver to despread a signal received on each element with a spreading code i, accumulating the despread signal over a symbol duration, scaling the accumulated signal by the weight vector, summing all of the scaled values and squaring the result, and averaging the squared result over R samples to determine the output power for code i for the current subscriber station, wherein R has a value in the range of about 16 symbols to about 64 symbols; and assigning a spreading code that is determined to have the minimum output power to the current subscriber station.