Patent ID: 7821992

Claim:
A method of processing data blocks transmitted in sequence from a user equipment (UE) to a network controller by way of an at least one intermediary base station in a mobile communication network, the method comprising: transmitting a sequence of data blocks from the UE to the base station for decoding; monitoring a number of times a data block among said sequence of data blocks has been retransmitted from the UE to the base station; detecting a radio transmission failure when the number of times that the data block has been retransmitted from the UE to the base station exceeds a predetermine threshold; and providing failure information from the base station to the network controller, wherein the failure information is associated with the data block that has been retransmitted in excess of the predetermined threshold and not successfully decoded by the base station, such that the network controller proceeds to process the sequence of data blocks successfully decoded by the base station, in response to receiving the failure information from the base station, wherein the failure information identifies the data block that has been retransmitted to the base station for decoding in excess of the predetermined threshold, and not successfully decoded by the base station, so that the network controller in response to receiving the failure information continues to process successfully decoded data blocks without waiting to receive the retransmitted data block, wherein the radio transmission is related to Hybrid Automatic Repeat request (HARQ), and wherein providing the failure information comprises: sending a HARQ failure indication to the network controller if either, a HARQ process has not yet been successfully decoded and an indicator for indicating transmission of new data is received for the same HARQ process and the number of HARQ retransmissions that had already occurred was higher than the lowest of MAC-d flows maximum HARQ retransmission values, or sending a HARQ failure indication to the network controller if a HARQ process has not yet been successfully decoded and the maximum retransmissions for a MAC-d flow with the highest maximum HARQ retransmission valid for a UE connection have occurred, or should have occurred in case the HARQ related outband signaling on an E-DPCCH could not be decoded.