COORDINATED BEAMFORMING (CoBF) CONFIGURATION AND RECEIVER PROCESSING FOR WIRELESS NETWORKS

A method of processing a wireless signal at a receiver in a wireless communication system, the method comprising:

• receiving a wireless signal including a plurality of spatially multiplexed data streams transmitted by one or more access points (APs) using coordinated beamforming (CoBF) or multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO);
• processing the wireless signal to extract one or more data streams intended for the receiver by projecting the wireless signal into a subspace corresponding to the receiver;
• and
• providing the extracted data streams to a demodulator for data recovery, wherein the processing is performed using a shared signal processing pipeline for the CoBF and MU-MIMO transmissions.

A wireless communication system configured to provide coordinated beamforming (CoBF) transmission, comprising:

• a plurality of access points (APs), each comprising:
• a plurality of physical antennas;
• and
• signal processing circuitry configured to map a number of the physical antennas to a common number of logical antennas;
• and
• a controller configured to:
• select a plurality of APs to transmit to a plurality of stations (STAs) in the CoBF transmission;
• assign spatial streams to the STAs such that each STA is assigned no more than a threshold number of spatial streams, and a total number of spatial streams assigned to the STAs does not exceed a maximum total stream count;
• and
• configure each of the APs to use the common number of logical antennas selected from a set of antenna counts.