Patent ID: 7893871

Claim:
A method for beamforming between and a beamformer a beamformee having N R receive antennas, wherein the beamformer knows respective channels associated with M receive antennas of the beamformee, wherein M is less than N R , and wherein a partial channel matrix describes a multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) channel between the beamformer and the M receive antennas; the method comprising: steering one or more of streams from the beamformer toward the M receive antennas of the beamformee using the partial channel matrix, wherein the beamformer has N S streams to transmit to the beamformee; and if N S is greater than a rank of the partial channel matrix between the beamformer and the beamformee, using the partial channel matrix to steer remaining streams through a null space of the partial channel matrix, wherein the N S streams are steered simultaneously.