Method and apparatus for managing communication when a serving beam becomes invalid in a wireless communication system

Abstract

A method for a wireless communications system is disclosed. In one example, user equipment (UE) maintains at least one serving beam, and uses a serving beam to perform an uplink (UL) transmission of data. The data is stored in an uplink hybrid automatic repeat request (UL HARQ) buffer. When there is a failure to track the serving beam, a beam recovery procedure is initialized. After successful completion of the beam recovery procedure, the UE retransmits the data stored in the UL HARQ buffer. The UE prevents the data from being flushed from the UL HARQ buffer when the failure to track the serving beam occurs, so that the data can be retransmitted.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.