An error detection unit performs erasure decoding for physical layer packets and an assembler assembles the received data into higher layer packets. Higher layer packets that are incomplete are not erased if the higher layer packets contain some data indicated as valid by the error detection unit. In the case of incomplete packets, the data is labeled by assigning a value to a reliability attribute for the data to enable the decoder to discriminate between valid and invalid data in the same packet. The decoder is modified to use “dimmed” data from the incomplete packets to perform decoding.