Patent ID: 8838048

Claim:
A radio communication apparatus including an antenna set including a plurality of antennas and executing spatial-multiplexing based communication, comprising: an antenna selection unit that selects from the antennas a combination of antennas whose quantity is equal to or less than a quantity of counterpart antennas to be communicated, as a combination of antennas to be used in spatial-multiplexing based communication; a signal processing unit that executes signal processing for communication using the combination of antennas selected by the antenna selection unit; a reception quality detecting unit that detects a reception quality for each combination of a plurality of antennas; and a communication environment change detecting unit that detects a time-dependent change in a predetermined amount of variation in communication environment of the radio communication apparatus, wherein the antenna selection unit selects the combination of antennas to be used according to a result of comparison of reception qualities detected by the reception quality detecting unit, and varies a period of changing a combination of antennas to be selected, depending on whether the time-dependent change in the amount of variation detected by the communication environment change detecting unit is equal to or less than a predetermined reference value.