The UE VoIP engine monitors the network pattern periodicity and implements a scalable scheduling strategy that can adapt the VoIP engine and audio driver scheduling to the current local radio configuration in one embodiment. By adapting its scheduling, the VoIP engine can reduce mouth-to-ear delay or power consumption without impacting the audio encoding quality. The UE VoIP engine sends some scheduling preference to the network base station. The network base station monitors UE preferences and decide whether to ignore or accept UE preferences and allows the UE to operate in the conditions that provides the best tradeoff between power consumption and mouth-to-ear delay.