Patent ID: 8036099

Claim:
A method of reducing temporal variations in interference in a wireless communication network comprising, at each of one or more base stations: transmitting data to a plurality of mobile stations via an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) signal comprising a plurality of subcarriers transmitted from two or more transmit antennas according to a fixed number of linear precoding weight sets; forming subcarrier sets by assigning each subcarrier to one of the linear precoding weight sets; assigning each mobile station to one of the subcarrier sets; and restricting changes to the subcarrier sets to superframe interval boundaries, including changing the subcarrier sets as needed at superframe interval boundaries in response to changing loading conditions, and further making said changes to the subcarrier sets in a manner that minimizes the number subcarriers that are changed from one precoding weight set to another; wherein a superframe interval is defined to be at least several multiples of a channel quality measurement cycle time associated with the mobile stations; and wherein the channel quality measurement cycle time is a link adaptation lag associated with the base station updating transmit data rates to individual ones of the mobile stations responsive to receiving channel quality reports from the mobile stations.