Wireless communication method and apparatus for encoding and decoding beamforming vectors

A base station comprising:

• a downlink reference signal generator configured to generate a reference signal including a plurality of indices associated with beamforming or precoding information, wherein one of the indices is associated with a particular wireless transmit/receive unit (WTRU), and the remaining indices are associated with WTRUs that interfere with the particular WTRU;
• a downlink control channel generator configured to generate a plurality of control channels, each control channel being associated with a respective one of the indices included in the reference signal;
• a multiplexer configured to multiplex the reference signal and the control channels to generate a multiplexed signal;
• and
• at least one antenna configured to transmit the multiplexed signal.

A desired wireless transmit/receive unit (WTRU) comprising:

• at least one antenna configured to receive a multiplexed signal;
• a demultiplexer configured to demultiplex the signal into a reference signal and a plurality of control signals, the reference signal including a plurality of indices associated with beamforming or precoding information, wherein one of the indices is associated with the desired WTRU, and the remaining indices are associated with other WTRUs that interfere with the desired WTRU, and each control channel being associated with a respective one of the indices included in the reference signal;
• a downlink control channel detection, decoding and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) unit configured to receive the control channels from the demultiplexer and output the index associated with the desired WTRU;
• and
• a blind detector configured to subtract a signal constructed using beamforming or precoding information corresponding to the index associated with the desired WTRU from the reference signal to estimate beamforming vectors associated with the other WTRUs.