Patent ID: 7342535

Claim:
A beam-forming apparatus for an antenna diversity system with an array antenna configured by a plurality of antenna elements, the apparatus comprising: a noise calculator for estimating a noise power of the radio channel; a channel estimator for estimating directional channel impulse responses at beam-forming angles mapped to the antenna elements using the noise power; an angle of arrival (AoA) determiner for generating a plurality of candidate angles of arrival, the number of the candidate angles of arrival being more than the number of the antenna elements, applying a spatial interpolation to energy values at the beam-forming angles according to the estimated directional channel impulse responses, evaluating the energy values at the candidate angles, and selecting a primary angle of arrival among the candidate angles of arrival according to the evaluated energy values; and a beam-former for computing beam-forming weights based on differences between the beam-forming angles and the selected primary angle of arrival, and applying the beam-forming weights to the plurality of antenna elements of the array antenna.