Patent ID: 8325735

Claim:
A method of configuring a base station entity to load balance a backhaul on a reverse link, comprising: configuring a load balancer in the base station entity, the load balancer being configured to include a number of queues and a link scheduler, the link scheduler configured to drain packets from the queues and output the drained packets to a plurality of physical channel interfaces, each of the plurality of physical channel interfaces interfacing with a respective channel of the backhaul; and configuring at least one packet control interface in the base station entity to receive packets for transmission over the backhaul and for storing the received packets in one of the queues of the load balancer, wherein the packets include user traffic packets and interface packets, each of the user traffic packets has a priority class and each of the interface packets being one of a control, management and signaling packet for a particular channel of the backhaul, and the load balancer is configured to include a traffic queue for each of a plurality of priority classes and an interface queue for each of the plurality of physical channel interfaces.