In this paper we study the fundamental problem of allocating with efficiency and fairness the available resources in a CDMA wireless system that supports multi-rate multimedia services. We propose the Channel Adaptive Rate Scheduling (CARS) algorithm which adopts the use of dynamically assigned data rates that match the channel capacity in order to improve the system throughput and overcome the problems associated with the channel changing conditions, the variable system capacity and the transmission power limitation. In addition to the throughput improvement CARS also achieves the objective of fairness by adjusting the users? weights dynamically. The performance analysis and evaluation of our proposed algorithm is achieved via modeling and simulation in terms of achievable throughput and fairness.