A method for obtaining a report from a mobile station on the status of frames comprising an entire message transmitted to the mobile station is disclosed. First, a polling request is sent to the mobile station from a base station. A status report is then sent to the base station. The polling request specifies whether the mobile station should send the status report on a reservation basis (using a reserved frame) or on a contention basis (using an idle frame). The mobile station then transmits a bit map to the communication system to indicate which frames have been correctly received by the mobile station at the point when it received the polling request.