Patent ID: 7532883

Claim:
A method comprising: at a base transceiver station (BTS) that operates in a wireless communications network and serves a plurality of customer premises equipments (CPEs), receiving signals at a plurality of antennas of the BTS from each of the plurality of CPEs and determining a spatial signature for each CPE based on signals received from the corresponding CPE; calculating a correlation between spatial signatures of every two CPEs in the plurality of CPEs and designating two CPEs as channel-sharing candidates if the correlation between their spatial signatures is lower than a predetermined threshold; creating a first set of CPEs of all the channel-sharing candidates; counting a number of channel-sharing candidates for every CPE; selecting a first CPE that has the fewest number of channel-sharing candidates; creating a second set of CPEs by identifying all the channel-sharing candidates of the first CPE; selecting a second CPE in the second set of CPEs that has the fewest number of channel-sharing candidates; and selecting the first and second CPEs to share a channel.