1. A method for allocating transmission resources in an uplink of a wireless communications network, the method comprising: assigning a utility function to each user in a set of users; selecting a set of selected users from the set of users, wherein the selecting comprises: iteratively selecting UP to K users from the set of users; removing an old user from the set of selected users when selecting a new user during the iteratively selecting; checking a value of the utility function as users are iteratively selected; and selecting a set of UP to K users where the utility function has a maximum value, wherein K is a maximum number of users in the set of selected users less than a total number of users in the set of users; assigning uplink transmission resources to each user in the set of selected users; and transmitting a control message to each user in the set of selected users.