An enhanced paging mechanism is provided for UEs waking up from a very long paging cycle to improve paging robustness and flexibility. Enhanced paging includes absolute time paging (ATP) and paging with extended wakeup time. For absolute time paging, a UE receives ATP configuration and uses the actual wall time to calculate paging occasion if a condition is satisfied. In one embodiment, the wall time is acquired from at least one of an internal UE clock, a GPS time, information broadcasted from the network, or information from a higher layer signaling. For paging with extended wakeup time, a UE applies a long paging cycle followed by multiple normal paging cycles after waking up from the long paging cycle. In one embodiment, the long paging cycle is infinite and the UE enters normal paging cycle only upon TAU-triggered paging or uplink traffic.