Embodiments of the disclosure relate to operational association between communication devices in the presence of a link-budget imbalance between an upstream link and a downstream link at one of the communication devices. The association relies on a request for a narrowband resource block sent from the communication device having the link-budget imbalance to a remote communication device that can schedule and/or allocate the narrowband resource block. The request can be modulated according to an on-off keying modulation scheme or can be encoded according to a multi-repetition encoding scheme. In response to the narrowband resource block being allocated, an association request can be sent to the remote communication device in the narrowband resource block.