Patent ID: 8032184

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving uplink signals from a mobile device in a wireless communication network at a plurality of antennas of a base station device; calculating an average channel covariance matrix of one or more uplink sub-channels assigned to the mobile device; dividing a sector of a cell of the wireless communication network into a plurality of sub-sectors; transforming the average channel covariance matrix into a plurality of average sub-sector channel covariance matrices and computing therefrom an average uplink beamforming weighting vector group corresponding to the plurality of sub-sectors; selecting direction of arrival (DOA) sub-sectors from the plurality of sub-sectors using the plurality of average sub-sector channel covariance matrices; computing a time delay sequence for the DOA sub-sectors; and generating downlink beamforming weighting vectors using the average uplink beamforming weighting vectors corresponding to the DOA sub-sectors and information derived from the time delay sequence.