Patent ID: 6879561

Claim:
A method for scheduling packets for transmission over a forward link in a wireless communication system, comprising: (i) determining, on a per-packet basis, a wireless quality of service condition for each of a plurality of packets awaiting transmission to a terminal; (ii) receiving a reported channel condition for a forward link from the terminal; (iii) determining a link mode for transmission to the terminal according to the reported channel condition; and (iv) scheduling each of the plurality of packets in order of its respective wireless quality of service condition, and at the determined link mode, for transmission in a physical layer frame; wherein the determination of the wireless quality of service condition includes assigning a packet tag to each of the plurality of packets, the packet tag includes a start time and a finish time, wherein scheduling includes determining a deadline for each of the plurality of packets as a function of their respective start times and a current system time, and wherein the packet tag is defined to be P i,k where i represents the number of queues and k represents number of packets, an arrive time is defined to be t i,k a and is the current system time when the packet enters a queue, the finish time is defined to be t i,k f and is equal to t i,k a +D where D is the packet delay bound, the start time is defined to be t i,k s and is equal to t i,k f −D i,k ret −D i,k frag where D i,k ret is an estimated delay budget for retransmission for packets that can be retransmitted and D i,k frag is the estimated delay budget for fragmentation, and the deadline for each of the plurality of packets is defined to be t i,k d and is equal to the current system time t minus the start time t i,k s .