Certain aspects relate to methods and apparatus for latency reduction for UEs in a RRC connected mode. During contention-based uplink access by groups of UEs within a subframe, an eNB may decode the received uplink transmission based, at least in part, on the assigned group of resources assigned to the UE and used for transmission. Additional orthogonalization techniques such as reduced TTI size can be used to reduce collisions among different users performing contention-based transmissions. Furthermore, when the eNB fails to successfully decode the uplink transmission, the eNB may identify the UE that sent the uplink transmission based on a detected reference signal and may transmit an uplink assignment to the identified UE.