Patent ID: 8923321

Claim:
A method of operating a communication network comprising: defining a set of mobile stations as a group; defining a set of radio channel resources for allocation to said group; reserving at least one radio channel resource of said set of resources as a failure handling resource; sending control information to said group including indication of said set of radio channel resources and said failure handling resource; sending common control information to the group indicating resource assignments; determining that a specific mobile station of said group cannot reliably decode said common control information indicating resource assignment, based on receiving a notification message from the specific mobile station that the common control information could not be reliably decoded, wherein the notification message is a common control channel negative acknowledgement; in response to the notification message, assigning said failure handling resource to said specific mobile station; sending a bitmap having a bit position corresponding to said failure handling resource wherein said bit position provides an indication that said failure handling resource is allocated; and sending data that is not retransmitted common control information, to said specific mobile station using said failure handling resource that was allocated based on determining that common control information could not be reliably decoded by the specific mobile station.