Patent ID: 8462743

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving at an apparatus which comprises a relay node a grant from an access node of radio band resources that are available for allocation to the user equipments; and allocating by the relay node to the user equipments at least some of the radio band resources; receiving, by the apparatus from a plurality of user equipments, indications of channel quality experienced by the user equipments, wherein the indications are received at the relay node and are specific for a radio band resource allocated to the respective user equipment; aggregating by the apparatus the indications received from the plurality of user equipments into a compound signal quality metric; monitoring, by the apparatus, a buffer status of an apparatus buffer which comprises individual buffers for each of the plurality of user equipments; and sending by the apparatus a combination of an indication of the compound signal quality metric and a further indication of the buffer status to an access node controlling a cell in which the user equipments operate, wherein the further indication of the buffer status comprises a buffer overload or a buffer underload state determined individually for one or more of the plurality of user equipments by prediction based on the compound signal quality metric.