In this paper, we propose enhancements to radio link protocols by identifying decisive frames and categorizing them as crucial and non-crucial. The fact that initial frames from the same upper layer segment can afford a few trials of retransmissions and the later frames cannot, motivates our work. We treat the frames differentially with respect to FEC coding and ARQ schemes. We consider specific cases of FEC and ARQ strategies and qualitatively show how the differential treatment of frames can improve the performance of the RLP.