Methods and systems are provided for managing a smart antenna system to maximize energy efficiency while maintaining spectral efficiency and signal integrity. In accordance with certain aspects of a particularly preferred embodiment, antenna beamforming may be optimized at a base station by combining a recursive least squares beamforming technique with Kaiser windowing functions to enable side lobe cancellation in the emitted beam, thus enhancing the capacity and service quality of smart antenna systems. With respect to further aspects of a particularly preferred embodiment, processing methods may be implemented at the base station of a cellular network to cluster mobile stations in a way that improves overall energy efficiency of a base station in the cellular network. More particularly, mobile stations or users may be clustered using a linear radius clustering method and a last user sector based clustering method to direct the beam emitted from the base station antenna to those sectors determined to contain the users having the greatest signal resource need.