Patent ID: 7978784

Claim:
A method of antenna selection within a communication system having a first transceiver device having a plurality of transmission antennas and a second transceiver device having a plurality of receiving antennas, the method comprising: encoding transmission data to produce one or more encoded spatial data streams for transmission via a number of transmitting chains, wherein the number of encoded spatial data streams is different than the number of transmitting chains to be used to transmit the encoded spatial data streams and wherein the number of transmitting chains is less than the number of transmission antennas; using a spatial spreading matrix to distribute the one or more encoded spatial data streams to the number of transmission chains, wherein the spatial spreading matrix has components associated with a row dimension having a number of rows equal to the number of transmission chains to be used to transmit the encoded spatial data streams and a column dimension having a number of columns equal to the number of encoded spatial data streams to be transmitted; and selecting one or more of the plurality of transmission antennas to be used to transmit data to one or more of the plurality of receiving antennas via a channel estimation matrix between the first transceiver device and the second transceiver device, wherein the channel estimation matrix has components associated with a row dimension having a number of rows equal to a number of receiving chains and a column dimension having a number of columns equal to the number of encoded spatial data streams to be transmitted, and wherein selecting the one or more of the plurality of transmission antennas comprises accounting for the spatial spreading matrix in the channel estimation matrix.