Techniques for beamforming

A method for requesting beamforming information, the method comprising:

• transmitting, by a beamformer device, a request to a beamformee device, wherein the request comprises a set of sounding tone indices that indicate tones for which a report of beamforming information is requested from the beamformee device,
• wherein the tones are defined according to a first WiFi scheme,
• wherein the set of sounding tone indices is based on a first tone plan defined by the first WiFi scheme for a partial channel bandwidth and on a second tone plan defined by a second WiFi scheme for a full channel bandwidth, and
• wherein the sounding tone indices are based on one of the following:
• (i) a reuse of sounding tone indices defined for resource units of the second tone plan and a definition of which of the resource units of the second tone plan correspond to resource units of the first tone plan,
• (ii) a unified sounding index set that comprises sounding tone indices for both the first tone plan for the partial channel bandwidth and the second tone plan for the full channel bandwidth, and
• (iii) a sounding index set for the partial channel bandwidth and additional center tones indices for the full channel bandwidth;
• and
• receiving the report of beamforming information from the beamformee device based on the set of sounding tone indices.

A beamformer device comprising a memory configured to store instructions and a processor configured to execute the instructions stored in the memory to cause the beamformer device to:

• transmit a set of sounding tone indices to a beamformer device;
• receive a beamforming report from the beamformee device in response to the set of sounding tone indices, wherein the beamforming report comprises a compressed precoder matrix;
• and
• reconstruct a precoder matrix based on the compressed precoder matrix,
• wherein the compressed precoder matrix is defined by a set of angles in an order that implies a sequence of mathematical operations to be applied on a unit matrix to reconstruct the precoder matrix, and
• wherein the set of angles is determined based on an extension of a formula for a number of transmit antennas and a number of spatial streams supported by 802.11ax WiFi to a number of transmit antennas (Nr) and a number of spatial streams (Nc) supported by 802.11be WiFi.