System and method for applying smoothed beamforming

A wireless station deployed in a wireless local area network and in communication with an access point over a communication channel, the access point transmitting using a plurality of antennas, the wireless station comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a memory coupled with the processor, wherein the memory is configured to provide the processor with instructions which when executed cause the processor to:
• receive a channel estimation matrix characterizing the communication channel, the channel estimation matrix being associated with a plurality of feedback indices relating to respective plurality of subcarriers;
• determine a beamforming matrix using the channel estimation matrix, the beamforming matrix being generated for a plurality of down-sampled feedback indices being a subset of the plurality of feedback indices;
• the beamforming matrix including beamforming weights for one or more antennas associated with the access point, each beamforming weight being a complex value including an amplitude and a phase;
• set the phase of the beamforming weight for a last antenna associated with the last row index of the beamforming matrix to zero and rotating the phase of each beamforming weight for each of the other antennas;
• perform smoothing of the beamforming matrix for each feedback index by normalizing each column vector of the beamforming matrix;
• compress the smoothed beamforming matrix;
• and
• provide the smoothed beamforming matrix as output.