Patent ID: 8644288

Claim:
In a wireless communication system employing uplink (UL) spatial division multiple access (SDMA), a method comprising: measuring, at a base station, an uplink channel transfer function between at least a first single user of a plurality of users and each receive antenna of the base station based on received uplink (UL) signals corresponding to the plurality of users; representing the uplink channel transfer function using eigen-vectors; obtaining a normalization of a covariance of channel responses associated with the plurality of users; determining when a signal is transmitted via UL SDMA, based on one or more SDMA switching conditions; when one or more of the SDMA switching conditions are not satisfied, identifying a signal for single signal assignment to a sub-channel for UL transmission to the base station; and when one or more of the SDMA switching conditions are satisfied, selecting at least a pair of users from the plurality of users and allocating multiple signals on same time-frequency resources to the selected pair of users for transmissions to the base station using SDMA, wherein the one or more SDMA switching conditions comprise switching to SDMA when an aggregate SDMA throughput of the selected pair of users is greater than or equal to a throughput of the first single user.