Patent ID: 8824420

Claim:
A method for generating antenna selection (AS) signals in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless communication network, comprising: transmitting a first AS signal by the user equipment (UE) using a first antenna of the UE; transmitting a second AS signal by the UE using a second antenna of the UE, wherein the first AS signal and the second AS signal are transmitted alternatively, and wherein the first and the second AS signals are broadband sounding reference signals of the OFDM network; estimating uplink channels in a base station (BS) for the first antenna and for the second antenna using the first and the second AS signals; and selecting, in the BS based on best uplink channel quality of the estimated channels, between the first antenna and the second antenna of the UE to transmit user data to the BS, wherein the first AS signal is transmitted k times more often than the second AS signal while the first antenna is selected, wherein the second AS signal is transmitted k times more often than the first AS signal while the first antenna is selected, and wherein k is five, ten or fifteen.