The present invention is related to an error handling in transmission of
information units in radio links and in particular it is related to an
error handling using automatic repeat request (ARQ) and transmission of
information units in mobile communication. To reduce the access delay of
packet data services, the present invention uses different code ratings
according to type II hybrid ARQ for different erroneous information units
selected from a formatted block of information units before
retransmission. Therefore erroneous information units of a block of
information units, that have been transmitted, are selected and the set
of selected erroneous information units is divided into a set of n
subsets encoded with n code ratings. Advantageously, the retransmission
of portions of the formatted block with different code ratings enhances
the reliability of the retransmission.