Patent ID: 8054741

Claim:
A joint scheduling method for increasing frequency efficiency and fairness in a distributed antenna system using frequency reuse and common control power, comprising: (a) selecting packets for transmission to Mobile Stations (MSs), said selecting taking into account Quality of Service (QoS) in at least one of a Base Station (BS) and a Relay Station (RS) and grouping the packets into packet groups; (b) selecting packets from the packet groups formed in step (a), grouping links corresponding to the packets into a link group, and performing a joint power control on the link group; (c) performing link elimination and link addition in the link group until optimal solutions are achieved for the links of the link group in the joint power control; and (d) allocating channels to the links when the optimal solutions are achieved for the links in step (c) and updating the status of a user queue of the at least one of the BS and the RS; wherein the QoS-based packet selection in step (a) comprises selecting the packets for the MSs according to priority levels of the MSs by the following equation k m * = arg ⁢ ⁢ max k ∈ s ⁡ ( m ) ⁢ PM k , m where PM k,m denotes a priority metric for a k th user queue in an m th RS and the priority metric can be one of time delay and the amount of transmission data.