Integrated scheduling and buffer management for 3G wireless forward packet data channels

Third generation (3G) wireless networks have been designed to provide high speed data services on both forward and reverse links. In addition to increased data capacity they also support QoS (quality of service) guarantees for user applications. Users may run multiple applications (service instances) simultaneously and QoS guarantees must be assured for one or more of them. In order to maintain these QoS guarantees for each user´s service instance, the radio resources assigned to the mobile must be adjusted in real time. However, the forward packet data channel in 3G systems are time-shared among all mobiles. Furthermore, the forward link channel conditions of the mobile changes over time. This implies that the forward link throughput available to the mobile is stochastic. In this paper, we address the linkage between the application demands (i.e., based on the QoS attribute guarantees) and the available channel capacity (i.e., resources assigned by the scheduler) and present a simple solution to the problem.