In a transmission from the second communication device 410 to the first communication device 450, at the second communication device 450, each receiver 454 receives a signal via a corresponding antenna 452. Each receiver 454 recovers information modulated to the RF carrier, converts the radio frequency stream into a baseband multicarrier symbol stream to be provided to the receiving processor 456. The receiving processor 456 and the multi-antenna receiving processor 458 perform signal processing functions of the L1 layer. The multi-antenna receiving processor 458 performs receiving analog precoding/beamforming on a baseband multicarrier symbol stream from the receiver 454. The receiving processor 456 converts the baseband multicarrier symbol stream after receiving the analog precoding/beamforming from time domain into frequency domain using FFT. In frequency domain, a physical layer data signal and a reference signal are de-multiplexed by the receiving processor 456, wherein the reference signal is used for channel estimation, while the data signal is subjected to multi-antenna detection in the multi-antenna receiving processor 458 to recover any the first communication device-targeted spatial stream. Symbols on each spatial stream are demodulated and recovered in the receiving processor 456 to generate a soft decision. Then the receiving processor 456 decodes and de-interleaves the soft decision to recover the higher-layer data and control signal transmitted on the physical channel by the second communication node 410. Next, the higher-layer data and control signal are provided to the controller/processor 459. The controller/processor 459 performs functions of the L2 layer. The controller/processor 459 can be connected to a memory 460 that stores program code and data. The memory 460 can be called a computer readable medium. In the transmission from the second communication device 410 to the second communication device 450, the controller/processor 459 provides demultiplexing between a transport channel and a logical channel, packet reassembling, decryption, header decompression and control signal processing so as to recover a higher-layer packet from the core network. The higher-layer packet is later provided to all protocol layers above the L2 layer, or various control signals can be provided to the L3 layer for processing.