Broadly speaking, the invention comprises systems and methods that use the number of mobile stations, denoted by N, communicating with a base station, as a variable that determines the optimum induced change rate, R, and the antenna beam width, W, of a time-varying base station antenna gain pattern used in conjunction with a forward power modulation (FPM) or a similar scheme to maximize the overall data throughput from the base station by taking advantage of multi-user diversity. In one embodiment, the FPM scheme is turned off if N is below a lower threshold. If N is above this threshold, the FPM scheme is turned on with R and W set to appropriate values. Generally, higher values of N correspond to higher values of R and lower values of W.