Patent ID: 8891597

Claim:
A method for beamforming within a communication system, wherein the communications system includes (i) a first communication device having a first plurality of antennas and (ii) a second communication device having a second plurality of antennas, the method comprising: applying one or more of a plurality of compensation factor sets to the first plurality of antennas, wherein each compensation factor set includes at least one compensation factor; while applying a first compensation factor set to the first plurality of antennas, selecting a modulation and coding scheme (MCS) for communicating with the second communication device; for each of the one or more compensation factor sets (i) developing a steering matrix based on a data unit received at the first communication device from the second communication device, (ii) transmitting one or more data units from the first communication device to the second communication device while applying the steering matrix and the compensation factor set to the first plurality of antennas, and (iii) determining, at the first communication device, a channel performance indicator based on the one or more data units, including (a) determining an unsteered channel performance, (b) determining a steered channel performance, and (c) determining a channel performance delta, wherein the channel performance delta is the difference between the unsteered channel performance and the steered channel performance; and selecting, based on the channel performance indicators including the channel performance deltas, a compensation factor set, from the one or more of the plurality of compensation factor sets, to be used in subsequent beamforming operations.