30 Bell Labs Technical Journal ◆ July–September 1998 Introduction Present mobile cellular systems have only a lim- ited ability to transmit data, a fact that has been observed by I. Alanko et al. 1 and C. J. Mathias. 2 For example, the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and IS-95 standards permit a transmission rate up to about 10 kb/s. This rate, how- ever, is too low to satisfy the requirements of many applications. In this paper we present algorithms for dynamically allocating carriers to mobile units to pro- vide peak rates on the order of 400 kb/s. These algo- rithms can be implemented in conjunction with a group of narrowband time division multiple access (TDMA) carriers, such as the North American IS-136 system or the European GSM system. Indeed, they can be used in existing networks and operated within modest bandwidth requirements of a few megahertz. To understand our approach, the reader must bear in mind two important distinctions between voice and data traffic. First, data traffic is much more bursty than voice traffic. Second, data traffic has different quality- of-service (QoS) requirements than those of voice traf- fic. On the one hand, data traffic is much more tolerant to delay than voice traffic; response times of several seconds are acceptable for data, whereas voice signals can only be delayed a fraction of a second. On the other hand, data is much more sensitive to bit errors, requiring error rates of 10 -6 , whereas voice can be satis- factorily transmitted with 10 -3 . These distinctions led us to very different approaches for allocating bandwidth. In particular, the ♦ Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation Algorithms for High-Speed Data Wireless Networks Matthew Andrews, Simon C. Borst, Francis Dominique, Predrag R. Jelenkovic, Krishnan Kumaran, K. G. Ramakrishnan, and Philip A. Whiting Next-generation wireless networks are expected to support a wide range of high- speed data services, with Web browsing as one of the major applications. Although high data rates have been shown feasible in a single-user setting, the resource allo- cation issues that arise in a multiple-user context remain extremely challenging. Compared with voice, data traffic is typically more bursty, while the users are less sensitive to delay. These characteristics require resource allocation strategies to oper- ate in a fundamentally different manner if the spectrum is to be used efficiently. In this paper we propose several algorithms for scheduling the efficient transmission of data to multiple users. As a new feature, the various schemes exploit knowledge of the buffer contents to achieve high throughput, while maintaining fairness by pro- viding quality of service (QoS) to individual users. The proposed algorithms are back- ward compatible with existing cellular and personal communications services (PCS) standards such as IS-136. They provide a powerful approach to improving spectrum efficiency in forthcoming high-speed data cellular services. The extensive simulation experiments we present in this paper demonstrate that the algorithms significantly outperform conventional schemes.