Systems and techniques for random access to a wireless network are described herein. Components of a wireless station may obtain a back-off value. The components may also decode random access resource units from a frame transmitted to the wireless station from an access point of the wireless network. The components may decrement the back-off for each decoded random access frame. The wireless station may select this frame from a sequence of frames when the back-off reaches zero while decoding the random access resource units of this frame. The wireless station then selects the random access resource unit with a more favorable transmission metric than another random access resource unit of the frame and uses the selected random access resource unit to communicate with the access point.