Scheduling in third generation wireless networks

Third generation wireless networks research appears in response to the growing need for any time, anywhere, integrated voice and data services. To support these new user demands, the third generation wireless networks of the future might be quite different from their predecessors. One of the places where changes are expected is in the mechanisms used to share the uplink among the variable composition of isochronous and bursty users in a cell; or, viewed from a different perspective, the mechanisms that schedule the utilization of the pool of uplink transmission slots in a cell. As a first step towards comparing different proposed schemes, this paper presents an enumeration of the desirable properties of schemes for uplink packet scheduling in third generation wireless networks. With this list of desirable properties in mind, we summarize the main characteristics of three of the proposed schemes: PRMA, STDD, and RAMA.