Low-overhead buffer level signalling using weighted prioritisation

A novel modification of weighted fair queuing is proposed that enables significant savings in the number of signalling bits required for the mobile terminals to indicate the status of their data buffers to the scheduling node. Results based on practical voice-over-IP system simulations, particularly applicable to UMTS/LTE, demonstrate that it is possible to achieve the same performance with single-bit buffer status reports (BSRs) as with full BSRs, provided that a buffer occupancy threshold and weighting factor are jointly adapted.