A method and apparatus for determining multilevel scheduling of a reverse link communication. An embodiment includes estimating capacity on the reverse link based on the sector load. An embodiment includes estimating load contribution based on an estimated signal-to-noise ratio. An embodiment includes estimating capacity available to schedule based on a ratio of measured other-cell interference over thermal noise, and based on sector load. An embodiment includes a method of distributing sector capacity across a base station (BS) and a base station controller (BSC). An embodiment includes determining priority of a station based on the pilot energy over noise plus interference ratio, the soft handoff factor, the fairness value, and the fairness factor α.