1. An apparatus, comprising: a Media Access Control (MAC) scheduler that generates a sort request; a hardware based sort coprocessor that services the sort request in accordance with specified packet processing priority parameters to generate a sorted array, wherein the hardware based sort coprocessor is configured to prioritize traffic based upon a priority parameter based on quality of service parameters, channel conditions, wait-in-queue time and timing efficiency; a shared memory separate from and accessible by each of the MAC scheduler and the hardware based sort coprocessor, wherein the MAC scheduler generates a sort request that is written to the shared memory, wherein the sort request references a sort list, a number of elements to sort and a maximum number of sorted elements to return; and the hardware based sort coprocessor accesses the sort request from the shared memory and operates to service the sort request.