Improved flow control and packet scheduling for shared channels in WCDMA

In contemporary wireless networks such as UMTS, one of the important problems is a scheduled sharing of the wireless link for different packet streams, according to a couple of mutually restricted principles, of which one is throughput and the other fairness. In this paper, a rank statistic based hybrid packet scheduling for downlink shared channel (DSCH) in the WCDMA system is presented, which compatibly and simultaneously considers both throughput and fairness principles. Subsequently, simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm and respective scheme achieves the twin goals of improving throughput and ensuring fairness among the packet flows with the same priority and also guarantees reasonable distinguishing among flows with different priorities. As a conclusion, the proposed scheme has advantages in optimizing resource utilization over the traditional ones originally used in the medium access control (MAC) layer in WCDMA.