Patent ID: 8649458

Claim:
A system comprising: a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) receiving system comprising a MIMO baseband module having N branches; a radio distribution network (RDN) connected to the MIMO receiving system, the RDN comprising at least two beamformers, wherein each of the beamformers is fed by two or more antennas, so that a total number of antennas in the system is M, wherein M and N are integers and M is greater than N, wherein each of the beamformers includes at least one combiner configured to combine signals coming from the antennas feeding the respective beamformer into a combined signal; and an antenna routing module configured to swap at least one pair of antennas, each of the antennas in the at least one pair being associated with a different beamformer, wherein said antenna routing module is configured to swap said at least one pair of antennas based on at least one qualitative indicator derived from the baseband module, wherein the at least one qualitative indicator comprises a combined power of all beamformers, PWR TOTAL , defined as: PWR TOTAL = ∑ r = 1 NBF ⁢ BF PWR r , wherein NBF represents the number of beamformers and BF PWR r represents the total received power by beamformer r, and the at least one swapped pair of antennas is selected to maximize PWR TOTAL .