Techniques for quickly and efficiently performing handover are described. A user equipment (UE) may maintain a link with a serving cell and may communicate with this cell via the established link. The UE may have a candidate set of non-serving cells that are candidates for handover. The UE may maintain uplink synchronization with one or more non-serving cells in the candidate set, without having to maintain links with any of the non-serving cells. The UE may update uplink synchronization with the non-serving cells via an access procedure, e.g., send access probes to the non-serving cells and receive timing adjustments from these cells. One non-serving cell with which the UE has maintained uplink synchronization may be selected as a target cell for handover. The UE may then perform handover from the serving cell to the target cell, without performing uplink synchronization during the handover, which may improve handover latency and success rate.