Patent ID: 7099623

Claim:
A method of managing beam tracker resources in a Wireless Communication Device (WCD) that tracks one or more tracked beams using the beam tracker resources, each of the one or more tracked beams originating from a respective one of one or more tracked transponders, comprising: (a) determining a tracked-beam (TB) searcher energy for each of the tracked beams; (b) determining an untracked-beam (UB) searcher energy for each of one or more untracked beams from each of the tracked transponders; (c) attempting to determine, based on the TB and UB searcher energies from steps (a) and (b), a preferred untracked beam among the one or more untracked beams that should become a tracked beam; and (d) assigning a tracking resource to track the preferred untracked beam when the attempt to determine the preferred untracked beam is successful.