A method includes constraining total power received from cellular users accessing a base station through any one of a TDMA access, CDMA access, and a derivation of a TDMA/CDMA access, and scheduling users for access to the base station within the constrained total power in response to an optimization that for each time slot determines a group of time critical cellular users and their transmission power factoring in instantaneous location-dependent channel states and long term quality of service performance. In the preferred embodiment, the optimization includes an iterative solution of an NP-hard Knapsak problem with initialization of maximum transmit power per cellular user inversely proportional to at least one of an activity factor of a cellular user's channel, the cellular user's antenna gain, the instantaneous channel gain of a dedicated uplink channel for the cellular user, and other-cellular user to same-cellular user interference ratio, and directly proportional to total resource power consumption.