Joint Switched-Beam Training and Rate Adaptation Schemes for MIMO WLANs

Abstract

A joint beam training and rate adaptation mechanism for downlink transmissions is presented for multiple input multiple output systems with switched beam antennas. The proposed method only depends on the beam patterns and the acknowledgement (ACK) replied by the receiver, and is compatible with the legacy WiFi standards. This feature makes not only the complexity of the beam training scheme extremely low, but also the feasibility relatively high. Due to the practical limitations of antenna designs and manufacturing, beam patterns may not have distinctive directivity for certain directions. Therefore, beam pattern scaling is utilized to make the resultant beam patterns match well with the ideal user directions and channel conditions. Simulation results with real switched beam patterns show that the precision of the training scheme is very high.