Patent ID: 8086229

Claim:
A method of operating a user equipment in a mobile communications system, the method comprising: operating a receiver of the user equipment to receive one or more data blocks via a channel; detecting a user equipment overload condition; in response to the detected user equipment overload condition, reporting a channel quality indicator (CQI) value to a serving base station, wherein the reported CQI value represents a channel quality that is lower than an actual quality of the channel; operating the user equipment in a manner that is consistent with the reported CQI value, including sending negative acknowledgements (NAKs) to the serving base station at a rate that is consistent with operation by means of a channel having a quality that corresponds to the reported CQI value, wherein sending NAKs to the serving base station at the rate that is consistent with operation by means of the channel having the quality that corresponds to the reported CQI value is further performed in a manner such that the NAKs are distributed over time in a way that emulates a distribution of NAKs that corresponds to the channel having the quality that corresponds to the reported CQI value.