3 5 would have normally been placed in the priority 3 transmission buffer however since the data block b 3 5 was missed and had to be retransmitted the data block b 3 5 is placed in either the priority 1 or priority 2 transmission buffer so that it is transmitted earlier than if it had been placed in the priority 3 transmission buffer upon reception of pdus in the node b the cmch pi is used to determine the priority queue b 1 n b 3 n the scheduler services the higher priority queues first and assign transmissions to transmitting h arq processors p 1 b p 5 b upon successful transmission to the ue the receiving h arq processors p 1 ue p 5 ue forward the retransmitted pdus to the rlc layer this procedure may also be applied for a dsch system except that the intermediate node is the crnc instead of the node b referring to fig8 pdus 805 with cmch pi indications are given priority by a prioritization entity 810 and are scheduled for transmission by the mac sh in the crnc the mac sh maintains multiple priority queues 815 a 815 b and a dsch transmission scheduler 820 determines which pdu 805 is to be transmitted based on the priority of that data therefore by setting increased cmch pi for dsch retransmissions these transmissions will be serviced in advance of other data for the ue this is similar to the hs dsch case where the node b mac hs entity schedules transmissions referring to fig9 a system is shown in accordance with the present invention.