Patent attributes
Methods and systems for Spatial Multiplexing Mu-MIMO radio communications are provided. An antenna array is controlled to establish plural radio beams which are mutually orthogonal in terms of excitation functions and which are differently spatially directed to cover a geographic area. The beams may be arranged in angular space in a pattern of rows, with adjacent rows being offset. To facilitate same, the antenna array may include elements which are offset from neighboring elements horizontally, vertically, or both. For each terminal, a subset of the radio beams may be selected for communication. The selection may prefer higher-power beams, where power is determined by summing contributions from eigen-channels. Subsets of radio beams may be grouped into orthogonal channels for use in servicing different sets of terminals in different geographic areas, and terminals sharing a channel may further share resources using multi-access techniques.
