Patent ID: 7298719

Claim:
A method for scheduling transmissions between a central hub and a plurality of remote terminals of a communication network, comprising: a) in at least one timeslot, assigning to each of the remote terminals a respective weight that is directly proportional to a gradient function relating the pertinent remote terminal to a measure of network performance; and b) selecting the highest-weighted remote terminal as the terminal to be served in the next transmission to be scheduled, CHARACTERIZED IN THAT c) each of the remote terminals has at least one associated token count that is incremented periodically and decremented when the pertinent remote terminal is served; and d) the respective weight assigned to each remote terminal is also directly proportional to an increasing function of at least one pertinent token count; e) the method further comprises, at least once, updating a respective token count associated with each of the remote terminals; the updating step comprises incrementing the pertinent token count by a quantity X and conditionally decrementing said count by a quantity r; and said count is decremented only on condition that the pertinent remote terminal has been served in the timeslot preceding the timeslot in which the updated token count will take effect.