A base station (101) will request the transmission of quality information from a particular remote stations (102, 103) only when data is queued to be transmitted to the remote stations. Once a remote station begins the transmission of channel quality information, the transmission of such information continues until the data transmission is successfully delivered to the remote station. The base station receives the channel quality information and adjusts the modulation and coding of the remote stations accordingly. Where data is transmitted simultaneously to a plurality of remote stations, a set of queues (303) for the multiple remote stations is maintained, and based on queue status, a channel quality request messages is sent to a sub-set of remote stations with data queued.