Patent ID: 8897237

Claim:
A method for granting scheduling requests, the method comprising the steps of: receiving, by a non public safety wireless communications system, multiple scheduling requests from multiple mobile stations of a plurality of mobile stations, wherein each of the multiple scheduling requests indicates that a corresponding one of the multiple mobile stations is requesting uplink data transmission resources from a base station included in the non public safety wireless communications system; determining, by the non public safety wireless communications system, a priority value for each of the multiple scheduling requests based on multiple scoring criteria, resulting in a plurality of priority values associated with the multiple scheduling requests, wherein the multiple scoring criteria includes public safety activity information that is received by the non public safety wireless communications system from a public safety system; and transmitting, by the non public safety wireless communications system, one or more scheduling request grants to a subset of the multiple mobile stations, wherein the subset includes one or more mobile stations of the multiple mobile stations that are associated with one or more scheduling requests of the multiple scheduling requests having relatively high priority values of the plurality of priority values.