Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate utilizing timers in conjunction with transmitting buffer status reports (BSR). A prohibit timer can be utilized to determine when BSRs can be transmitted to an eNB. The prohibit timer can be initialized or restarted upon transmitting a BSR to an eNB. A BSR retransmit timer can be used to determine when to retransmit a BSR. The BSR retransmit timer can be initialized upon transmitting a BSR to an eNB and restarted each time an uplink resource allocation is received from the eNB. Once the timer expires, if an uplink transmission buffer contains data (e.g., size>0), the BSR can be retransmitted to the eNB. Control data feedback can additionally be used to determine when to retransmit the BSR. In addition, in either case, the timer duration values can be provided by the eNB.