Patent ID: 6928304

Claim:
A method of handling the transmission of Radio Link Control (RLC) Protocol Data Units (PDUs) from a Radio Access Network (RAN) of a mobile telecommunications system to User Equipment (UE), the method comprising: at a Gateway (GW) of the UTRAN, segmenting RLC Service Data Units (SDUs) into RLC PDUs for transmission to at least one Base Station (BS) of a set of BSs belonging to a handover link set, and combining RLC PDUs received from the at least one BSs into RLC SDUs for transmission to a core network of the system; and at each of the at least one BS, buffering RLC PDUs received from at least one of the GW and the UE, and implementing an Automatic Repetition Request (ARQ) mechanism at each of the at least one BS to facilitate reliable transmission of RLC PDUs between the UE and the GW, the ARC) mechanism utilizing ARQ status messages sent over the air interface, between the UE and the BS(s), in order to acknowledge successfully transmitted data packets and request retransmission of unsuccessfully transmitted data packets.