Patent ID: 8848547

Claim:
A method, comprising: deciding at a user equipment (UE) an outage period during which the UE has limited communications with a serving base station; sending to the serving base station a signaling message indicating the outage period; and resuming a protocol operation after the outage period expires, wherein the protocol operation comprises at least one of: taking a measurement, sending a measurement report to the serving base station, or monitoring a physical downlink control channel, and wherein deciding the outage period comprises deciding whether a plurality of available processing gaps are exhausted, wherein the processing gaps are allocated to the UE to perform measurements of a plurality of closed subscriber group (CSG) base stations, and wherein deciding whether the available processing gaps are exhausted comprises taking into account the number of closed subscriber group (CSG) base stations and verifying a physical cell identifier (PCI) of each of the CSG base stations.