This paper presents an optimization-based approach to solve the wireless fair scheduling problem under a multirate time division multiple access (TDMA)-based medium access control (MAC) framework. By formulating the fair scheduling problem as an assignment problem, the authors propose the optimal radio channel allocation for multirate transmission (ORCA-MRT) algorithm for fair bandwidth allocation in wireless data networks that support MRT at the radio link level. The key feature of ORCA-MRT is that while allocating transmission rate to each flow fairly, it keeps the interaccess delay bounded under a certain limit. The authors investigate the performance of the proposed ORCA-MRT scheduler in comparison to another recently proposed multirate fair scheduling algorithm. They also propose two channel prediction models and perform extensive simulations to investigate the performance of ORCA-MRT for different system parameters such as channel state correlation, number of flows, etc.