Abstract
As the evolution of the end users' needs toward multimedia applications, an important feature of the third generation mobile networks like UMTS attempts to support efficiently multiple applications of different qualities of service. In the Radio Access Network, the RLC/MAC layer has also been designed to accommodate simultaneously mixed services through establishing multiple bearers. Thus, a major issue is the rate adaptation of these bearers. Moreover, third generation radio interface provides procedures to the rate adaptation in the lower layers such as PHY, MAC or RLC layer. In the paper, we focus on MAC layer and propose five scheduling methods in terms of different considerations. The five methods are strict priority method, partially dynamic priority method, dynamic priority method, probability priority method and load measurement based priority method. Our simulations show that load measurement based priority method can maintain better fairness and achieve better performance than the other four methods. Furthermore, the computation time of the load measurement based priority method is one of the smallest of the five methods.