Beam change and smoothing in mixed mode WLAN systems

摘要

A first wireless communication device including a physical layer device configured to generate a data packet having a mixed mode preamble. The mixed mode preamble includes a first portion to be transmitted omnidirectionally via a single stream, and a second portion to be transmitted in a beamformed manner. The mixed mode preamble includes a signal field corresponding to information about the data packet. The signal field includes a first sub-field that indicates a number of streams of the second portion and a second sub-field indicating, based on the first sub-field, whether to perform a beam change between the first portion and the second portion or whether to perform channel smoothing on the second portion. A transceiver is configured to transmit, from the first wireless communication device to a second wireless communication device, the data packet having the mixed mode preamble.