A method of enabling a user equipment to perform a contention based random access, includes maintaining a set of non-dedicated random access preambles for contention-free random access and a set dedicated random access preambles for contention-based random access. The method also includes determining a random access preamble identifier and transmitting a message to the user equipment containing the determined random access preamble identifier. Additionally, the method includes receiving from the user equipment a non-dedicated random access preamble that is selected by the user equipment based on the random access preamble identifier comprised in the transmitted message.