Determining when beam failure of a beam pair link has occurred is provided. Transient obstructions, and other interference effects can cause the failure of a beam pair link which can comprise a transmit beam and a receive beam associated with respective antennas on a transmitter and receiver. Switching to another beam pair link can cause decrease throughput and efficiency however, so the improved mechanism for determining a failure includes taking into consideration the importance of the beam pair link before initiating the beam recovery process. The configurable beam failure protocol defined herein considers the relative importance of the configured beam pair links when declaring the beam pair link a failure. The importance of the beam pair link can be based on the amount of downlink control information in the transmission.