APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR BEAMFORMING IN A CHANGING-INTERFERENCE ENVIRONMENT

An apparatus and method for adaptively producing transmitted signals and processing received signals in a communication system which includes smart antenna array of antenna elements. When processing received signals, the invention modifies an existing processing scheme by incorporating information about a second set of signals for which training or other characteristic information such as a reference is unknown to information about a first set of signals for which characteristic information such as a reference is known, prior to executing the processing scheme. This approach can be used to modify the receive weights which determine the relative weight assigned to the signals received from each of a plurality of antenna elements to take into account the presence of a changing interference environment. This permits an adaptive updating of the receive weights based on the additional information provided by the second set of data., and may be accomplished faster and with less computational resources than required to determine the weights based on applying the entire processing scheme to the second set of data. In addition, assuming a relationship between the transmit and receive environment, the invention can also be used to modify the transmit weights used by the base station.