Patent ID: 7117018

Claim:
A wireless communication system, comprising: a plurality of antennas forming a directional antenna array; and a beamformer coupled to the plurality of antennas, the beamformer comprising a plurality of multipliers, wherein each of the plurality of antennas has an associated multiplier from the plurality of multipliers, each multiplier responsive to receiving a signal from the associated antenna and multiplying the signal by a weighting factor, and an adder/splitter coupled to the plurality of multipliers, the adder/splitter configured to add the multiplied signals received from the plurality of multipliers and to split signals sent to the plurality of multipliers; wherein the wireless communication receiving system is responsive to exchanging wireless signals between at least one remote client; wherein the wireless communication system is responsive to exchanging wireless signals between the at least one remote client to locating angles associated with directions of arrival for wireless signals from the client with respect to each of the antenna array plurality of antennas; wherein the wireless communication system is responsive to locating angles associated with directions of arrival to determining values for the weighting factors for the plurality of multipliers, so as to create predetermined phase differences between the signals of the plurality of antenna elements, wherein the determining values for the weighting factors comprises sampling baseband signals from each antenna element, so as to obtain a representation of sampled signals from a particular client; wherein the wireless communication is configured to using the predetermined phase differences to direct at least one null toward at least one source of interference, so as to avoid signal interference; wherein the wireless communication system is configured to use the sampled signals to build up a covariance matrix R; and wherein the sampled signals X have vector components x 0 , x 1 , x 2 . . . x n that are expressed in matrix form such that X={x 0 x 1 x 2 . . . x n }, and wherein the wireless communication system is configured so that the covariance matrix R is built up such that R=XX H where R is the direct product of X, and X H is the Hermitian matrix of X.