This invention presents methods for MU-MIMO wireless communication systems comprising a BS with plural of antennas, either closely located or distributed; A plural of AFRs deployed over a coverage area, each AFR has N_BF≧1 BF antennas with a beam pattern facing the MU-BFer and N_UF≧1 UF antennas with a beam pattern facing UEs or downstream AFR(s); A channel estimation module for estimating the Total Channels between a plural of UEs and the BS with the AFRs in place; and, A MU-BFer that uses the estimates of the Total Channels to perform beamforming computations for transmitting and/or receiving multiple spatially multiplexed streams of signals to or from a plural of UEs using the same frequency resource.