Patent ID: 8611918

Claim:
A method comprising: collecting, by a base station, uplink channel quality information of one or more uplink channels of a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system employed by the base station to communicate with at least one subscriber station, wherein the uplink channel quality information is based at least in part on channel quality of uplink spatial channels and/or data streams; based at least in part on the uplink channel quality information computing, by the base station, downlink channel quality information estimating including an estimate of a usable number of downlink channels of a number of downlink channels; based at least in part on the downlink channel quality information, selecting one or more downlink channels of the number of downlink channels and determining downlink channel parameters for use by the base station to transmit signals to the at least one subscriber station via the one or more downlink channels; and based at least in part on the determined downlink channel parameters, receiving by the base station, from the at least one subscriber station, an uplink message including feedback information only for a subset of channels of the estimated usable channels.