Packet communication networks for transmission to wireless subscriber devices utilize both wireline and wireless packet routing components. The routing elements of these two different types often implement different packet scheduling algorithms, typically a form of Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) in the wireline portion of the network and Proportional Fairness (PF) queuing in the wireless domain. To improve resource allocation and thus end to end quality of service for time sensitive communications, such as integrated multimedia services, the present disclosure suggests adding the notion of slack time into either one or both of the packet scheduling algorithms. By modifying one or more of these algorithms, e.g. to reorder or shuffle packets based on slack times, global optimal resource allocations are possible, at least in certain cases.
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