Using antenna pooling to enhance a MIMO receiver augmented by RF beamforming

[0010]While standard MIMO receivers are capable of accumulating energy from all available antennas for each layer, without interdependency, additional antennas that are RF combined may need to rely on one weights setting that fits all layers, which may adversely affect performance; the source of the issue comes from the random or loosely correlated nature of the various layers' signals, as viewed by the various participant antennas in the RF beamforming; specifically, phases setting that optimizes a group of RF combined antennas' output for a given layer, may be suboptimal or even detrimental to others; it is therefore imperative to set a weight in such a way that will consider all layers.

[0011]Embodiments of the present invention provides a method that increases the set of antennas to be chosen, beyond the number of available inputs in the given RF combiners; it thus takes advantage of the very same randomness that characterizes the various layers' signals seen by each receiving anten