Patent ID: 7961704

Claim:
A method of scheduling data for transmission over an air interface of a radio access network, wherein the radio access network is a 3G network or an evolution of 3G, said data being transported over the air interface on a downlink shared channel, the method comprising: receiving data in the form of higher layer data units at a radio network controller; segmenting and/or concatenating said higher layer data units into protocol data units; forwarding said protocol data units from the radio network controller to a radio base station serving one or more user terminals, the radio network controller also identifying to the radio base station boundaries of the higher layer data units within the protocol data units, wherein said downlink shared channel is a high speed downlink shared channel, and an interface between the radio network controller and the radio base station is a lub interface; and at the radio base station, scheduling each protocol data unit, or sub-units thereof, for transmission over the air interface in dependence upon the higher layer unit(s) to which the data contained in the protocol data unit or sub-unit belong(s), the scheduling further comprises one of prioritizing MAC-hs queues including partly sent RLC SDUs over queues containing only completely sent RLC SDUs, prioritizing MAC-hs queues including on average small RLC SDUs over those MAC-hs queues including on average relatively large RLC SDUs, always scheduling sufficient resources to each MAC-hs queue to fully transmit at least one RLC SDU from a MAC-hs queue, or choosing one or more transport block sizes for the downlink shared channel suitable for carrying one or more complete RLC SDUs for a given MAC-hs queue.