Instead, the decision of which mobile nodes will be allowed to
transmit in a given time slot on a given frequency is determined by the scheduling algorithms provided by the LTE equipment vendor and/or the network operator. With opportunistic scheduling [Bender 2000; Kolding 2003; Kulkarni 2005],
matching the physical-layer protocol to the channel conditions between the
sender and receiver and choosing the receivers to which packets will be sent
based on channel conditions allow the radio network controller to make best use
of the wireless medium. In addition, user priorities and contracted levels of service (e.g., silver, gold, or platinum) can be used in scheduling downstream packet
transmissions. In addition to the LTE capabilities described above, LTE-Advanced
allows for downstream bandwidths of hundreds of Mbps by allocating aggregated
channels to a mobile node [Akyildiz 2010].