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 one user at a time from the set of users, with a combination of the selected users maximally increasing a value of the assigned utility functions, wherein K is a maximum number of users in the set of selected 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.