HYBRID COORDINATED SCHEDULING SCHEME FOR USE IN A RADIO ACCESS NETWORK

A radio access network, such as an LTE E-RAN, employs a hierarchical architecture and includes a services node that provides connectivity between the radio nodes in the RAN and a core network. The RAN employs a hybrid coordinated scheduling scheme in which independent schedulers are running on the services node and the radio nodes. In this way the services node can allocate scheduling resources for some of the UEs in the RAN while the radio nodes can allocate scheduling resources for the remaining UEs in their respective serving cells. In some cases a prioritization approach is used in which the radio nodes do not schedule any radio resources that have already been scheduled by the services node.