High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Precoding is a generalization of beamforming to support multi-layer transmission in multi-antenna wireless communications. In conventional single-layer beamforming, the same signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas with appropriate weighting such that the signal power is maximized at the receiver output. When the receiver has multiple antennas, single-layer beamforming cannot simultaneously maximize the signal level at all of the receive antennas. Thus, in order to maximize the throughput in multiple receive antenna systems, multi-layer beamforming is required.