Patent ID: 8259732
Filing Date: 2012-09-04
Classification: H04L,H04W

Abstract:
1. A method implemented in a radio base station for transferring data in a wireless communications system over a wireless interface between a radio network and a user equipment node (UE), comprising the base station performing the following steps: establishing a communication with the UE having at least one data flow; receiving data units from a radio link control layer in another node other than the base station, where the radio link control layer is a higher protocol layer than a medium access control layer; analyzing at the medium access control layer some or all of a radio link control layer header of a radio link control data unit received from the another node and associated with the one data flow; based on the analysis, determining at the medium access control layer a priority of the data unit relative to other data units associated with the one data flow; and scheduling at the medium access control layer transmission of higher priority data units associated with the one data flow before lower priority data units associated with the one data flow, wherein the radio network includes a radio network controller (RNC) coupled for communication with the radio base station, and wherein the higher radio link layer is a radio link control (RLC) layer implemented in the RNC and the medium access control layer is a high speed-downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH) medium access control layer implemented in the radio base station, and wherein the method does not rely on priority-specific signaling from the RNC to the radio base station to perform the determining step.