Method and radio base station for scheduling traffic in wide area cellular telephone networks

A base station comprising a scheduler of traffic to be transmitted on a channel, the scheduler comprising:

• a) means for determining a delay td of each incoming packet, wherein the delay td of the incoming packet is calculated using an arrival time of the incoming packet at the base station and a current scheduling time t, the arrival time being associated with an ID for the incoming packet and being used to dynamically create a table of arrival times;
• b) means for calculating at a current scheduling time t at least one value of a scheduling priority SchedP(i,t) the scheduling priority SchedP(i,t) being a function of a value (i) indicating the priority of the incoming packet and the delay td of each incoming packet;
• and
• c) scheduling means for scheduling the packets buffered in priority queues according to the values of the scheduling priority SchedP(i,t).

A method for scheduling traffic in wide area cellular telephone networks supporting the High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, wherein traffic containing packets related to users are buffered in priority queues according to a value (i) which indicates a priority for transmission assigned to an incoming packet, the method comprising:

• a) determining a delay td of the incoming packet;
• b) calculating at a current scheduling time t at least one value of a scheduling priority SchedP(i,t), the scheduling priority SchedP(i,t) being a function of the value (i) indicating the priority of the incoming packet and the delay td of the incoming packet;
• c) scheduling the packets buffered in the priority queues according to the values of the scheduling priority SchedP(i,t),
• d) defining N≧1 time instants (T1(i), T2(i), . . . , TN(i)) for each value (i) indicating the priority of the incoming packet, wherein TN(i) > . . . >T2(i) >T1(i) >0, being T1 (i) a minimum acceptable delay and TN(i) a maximum acceptable delay for the incoming packet with priority indicated by the value (i), and
• wherein the steps a), b) and c) are performed every transmission time interval.