Patent ID: 8345732

Claim:
A radio transceiver, comprising: a radio front end for communicating wirelessly with a transmitting device at a high throughput (HT) data rate, in which the radio front end receives a signal transmitted from the transmitting device, the wireless communicating comprising at least one of the transmitting device transmitting the signal over multiple antennas or the radio front end receiving the signal over multiple antennas; and a baseband processing logic to process the signal received by the radio front end to estimate transmitter beamforming parameters and to generate feedback information to the transmitting device regarding capabilities of the radio transceiver, the feedback information to be provided in an expansion of an established frame required of a communication protocol signal used for feedback transmission to the transmitting device, wherein the feedback information is appended as an extended field to a selected field of the frame and the feedback information includes a first appended bit to indicate that the radio transceiver is capable of receiving and transmitting beamformed signals, a second appended bit to indicate that the radio transceiver is capable of generating and transmitting channel estimates in a matrix form, and a third appended bit to indicate that the radio transceiver is capable of generating channel estimates and transmitting reduced format channel estimates, in which the feedback information is transmitted back to the transmitting device for the transmitting device to alter subsequent forward link transmissions to the radio transceiver based on capabilities of the radio transceiver.