In certain embodiments, a (e.g., 5G) wireless network has a (e.g., CBSD) base station and any suitable number of instances of user equipment (UE). For each group of one or more UEs, one of the UEs is designated as a primary UE that stores UE context information for the other (secondary) UEs in the UE group. To connect to a secondary UE, the base station can retrieve the UE context information from the secondary UE's associated primary UE without having to retrieve the secondary UE's context information from the core network, thereby reducing backbone bandwidth usage and delays in connecting the secondary UE, especially when many secondary UE request connections within a short time interval.