pdu necessarily is discarded from rlc nor does it imply that the pdu is not discarded preferably according to the invention corresponding pdu is not discarded from rlc by adding a term u03b4 2 in equation 2 one rlc discard operation or rlc reconfiguration is allowed between two consecutively received pdus for each disregarded sn u03b4 is increased by 1 when an sn is not disregarded u03b4 is reset to 2 the first embodiment of the invention can alternatively be considered as a prediction of the next received sequence number considering lost pdus in fig5 sequence numbers lt lt sns gt gt as received are input to a prediction entity lt lt prediction gt gt and an optional storage element lt lt buffer gt gt allowing for time alignment of received data with predicted data as need be the greater the number of lost pdus estimated from the number of transmission time intervals with no received pdus and the maximum number of transport blocks in the transport format the greater the prediction interval of sequence numbers to come if the next sequence number is not within the prediction interval it is disregarded in fig5 this is performed in entity lt lt cmp amp purge gt gt the purged sequence of sequence numbers lt lt purged sns gt gt is then fed to basic hfn update e g an entity operating according to the updating described in relation to fig4 if e g a transmitted sequence of sequence numbers is 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 and the received.