An effective SINR mapping based approach can be used to average the MI or RBIR values corresponding to narrowband SINR values in frequency between the resource blocks of the E-UTRA grid structure and then to estimate the downlink radio link quality from the averaged mutual information domain value by mapping it back to wideband SINR value covering the whole or partial E-UTRA system bandwidth. This wideband SINR value can then be further averaged in time and used as a downlink radio link quality estimate for E-UTRA radio link monitoring. Mutual information based effective SINR mapping is one example of an effective SINR mapping based approach.