Patent ID: 8289899

Claim:
A communication method for use in a radio communications system including a plurality of radio base stations to receive data transmitted from a mobile station over radio links and an intermediate network device to collect the received data from the radio base stations via a network, the communication method comprising: transmitting identical first data packets from the mobile station to the plurality of radio base stations in a parallel fashion, wherein first sequence numbers are affixed to the first data packets at the mobile station; forwarding the first data packets from each of the radio base stations to the intermediate network device by transmitting second data packets each of which includes two or more of the first data packets, wherein second sequence numbers are affixed to the second data packets at each of the radio base stations; receiving, at the intermediate network device, the second data packets from the radio base stations; checking, at the intermediate network device, the second sequence numbers affixed to the received second data packets and the first sequence numbers affixed to the first data packets included in the received second data packets, thereby detecting missing first sequence numbers and missing second sequence numbers; selecting, at the intermediate network device, at least one of the radio base stations based on a combination of statistics of the missing first sequence numbers and statistics of the missing second sequence numbers; permitting the selected at least one radio base station to continue said forwarding operation; requesting, from the intermediate network device, non-selected radio base stations to stop said forwarding operation; and requesting, from the intermediate network device to all the non-selected radio base stations, to resume said forwarding operation when the combination of statistics of the missing first sequence numbers and statistics of the missing second sequence numbers of the selected radio base station becomes lower than a threshold.