Scheduling of VoIP traffic over a time-shared wireless packet data channel

In traditional wireless networks, real-time services (e.g., voice) are transported over synchronous channels because of their delay sensitivity while data is transported over asynchronous channels because of its burstiness. It has recently been proposed that even real-time services can be efficiently transported over asynchronous channels, such as the time-shared channels supported on the forward link of 3G networks such as 1xEV-DO (Bender, P. et al., 2000), 1xEV-DV (Soong, A. et al., 2003) and HSDPA (Dahlman, E. et al., 1998). In order to provide acceptable user performance for services such as voice over IP (VoIP), while at the same time providing high user capacity, the allocation of resources to users must be carefully managed. In particular, the scheduler that allocates time slots to users must be carefully designed. We formulate the problem of scheduling VoIP users over a generic time-shared wireless packet data channel. We then propose a scheduling algorithm that achieves our stated objectives.