US Patent 7916081 Beamforming in MIMO systems

A beamforming method comprises transmitting a training sequence from a transmitter array employing a set of beamforming vectors from a beamforming codebook. A receive array employs a combining codebook to acquire channel state information from the received transmissions, and estimates a preferred beamforming vector and a preferred combining vector. At least the preferred beamforming vector (and, optionally, the preferred combining vector) is transmitted back to the transmitter array.