1. An apparatus, comprising: a shared memory separate from and accessible by each of a Media Access Control (MAC) scheduler and a hardware based priority value calculation coprocessor, wherein the MAC scheduler is a software process executing on a processor that generates a priority value calculation request with a specified formula and a list of metrics that is written to the shared memory, wherein the list of metrics includes priority parameters of channel conditions, wait-in-queue time and timing efficiency; and the hardware based priority value calculation coprocessor is a hardware device separate from the processor that accesses the priority value calculation request from the shared memory and is operative to service the priority value calculation request by using the specified formula to combine the list of metrics to compute a single priority value that is written to the shared memory for processing by the MAC scheduler.