Patent ID: 8879491

Claim:
A terminal comprising: a radio-frequency transmitter for transmitting packets on an uplink to a wireless cellular network; and processing apparatus comprising an upper protocol stack and a lower protocol stack coupled between the upper stack and the radio-frequency transmitter, the upper stack being arranged to process data according to one or more transport protocols and form the data into packets of a plurality of different types for transmission over a packet-based network, and the lower stack being arranged to receive said packets from the upper stack and process the packets for transmission via the wireless cellular network; wherein the lower stack comprises a plurality of packet queues each corresponding to a different respective priority level, and a packet decoder configured to decode a portion of each packet to determine its type and supply each packet in dependence on its type to a packet queue of a corresponding priority level; and wherein the lower stack further comprises a dequeuing mechanism configured to dequeue packets from said queues in dependence on the priority levels for transmission from the radio-frequency transmitter via the wireless cellular network to the packet-based network, wherein the dequeuing mechanism is configured, after a specified time period, to periodically dequeue one or more oldest packets regardless of priority level with a period that is dynamically variable.