c 42 n a distribution output 49 of the scheduler 40 then sends the packet with the highest priority index on for transmission fig3 illustrates the case where the data packet at the head of the sta_ 3 queue 42 c has been determined to have the highest priority so that the distribution output 49 is directing that packet 48 from the scheduler 40 for transmission preferably the calculating component 37 47 calculates the priority index for each data packet based in part on both data rate and waiting time a standard rate control algorithm is preferably used to determine the data rate waiting time for each packet in the queue is preferably determined based on a current time value minus the stamped arrival time two preferred variations of the calculations of the priority index are provided by the following equations where u03b1 is a weight factor to give higher priority to specific classes the weight factor u03b1 can be set differently per priority queue to give higher priority to one class or one sta over the other the weight factor u03b1 can be set to zero or small number to achieve maximum capacity the weight factor u03b1 can be set to value bigger than 1 to achieve the best qos performance currenttransmissiondatarate is the rate at which the ap is then using to transmit data maxdatarate is the maximum system specified rates e g for 802 11b it is 11 mbps as reflected in table 1 above tmax is a value for maximum allowed queuing tmax can be.