Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate indicating a dominant interferer to a target serving base station in a wireless communication environment. A mobile device can detect presence or absence of a dominant interferer. Further, an access probe that includes information related to the presence or absence of the dominant interferer can be generated. For example, the information can be included in a payload of the access probe as an explicit flag, an explicit indication of an interference level, a Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) value (e.g., reserved versus non-reserved, . . . ), etc. Moreover, the access probe can be transmitted to the target serving base station to initiate an access procedure. The target serving base station can select a time-frequency resource to be utilized for a responsive downlink transmission (e.g. access grant signal, subsequent access related message, . . . ) as a function of the information included in the access probe.