Supporting enhanced uplink transmission during soft handover

A wireless universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) frequency division duplex (FDD) communication system, the communication system comprising:

• a radio network controller (RNC) configured to initiate soft handover of enhanced uplink communications by a user equipment (UE), the RNC configured to select a single primary Node-B out of a plurality of Node-Bs receiving enhanced uplink data packets from the UE during soft handover, the RNC comprising a medium access control (MAC) entity configured to receive successfully received enhanced uplink data packets from the plurality of soft handover Node-Bs, each successfully received enhanced uplink data packet having a transmission sequence number, the MAC entity configured to reorder the successfully received enhanced uplink packets based on the transmission sequence number for in-sequence deliver to a radio link control (RLC) entity;
• the primary Node-B configured to transmit to the UE specified scheduling information, the specified scheduling information is not transmitted to the UE by any non-primary Node-Bs of the plurality of Node-B's, the primary Node-B configured to receive the enhanced uplink packets from the UE and transmit an acknowledgement or a negative acknowledgment to the UE in response to the received enhanced uplink data packet, the primary Node-B configured to deliver successfully received enhanced uplink data packets to the RNC;
• the non-primary Node-Bs configured to receive the enhanced uplink packets and to deliver successfully received enhanced uplink packets to the RNC;
• and
• the UE configured to transmit enhanced uplink data packets to the plurality of Node-Bs, the UE configured to receive acknowledgments and negative acknowledgements from at least the non-primary Node-B, the UE configured in response to receiving a negative acknowledgement to retransmit an enhanced uplink data packet associated with the negative acknowledgment, the retransmission of the negative acknowledgment is given a higher priority for transmission than other non-negative acknowledgment enhanced uplink data packets for transmission.