OPPORTUNISTIC UTILIZATION AND MITIGATION OF UNUSED UPLINK GRANTS IN WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS

Aspects disclosed herein relate to utilizing and/or mitigating superfluous resource grants in a wireless network. In one aspect, an uplink resource grant is received from a network node, and a plurality of protocol data units are mapped from a buffer over the uplink resource grant in generating a transport block for transmitting data. It is determined that additional resources remain on the uplink resource grant after mapping the protocol data units, and one or more additional protocol data units are mapped for opportunistically transmitting data from a best effort buffer over the additional resources. In another aspect, a maximum grant size for a user equipment (UE) is computed based at least in part on a modulation and coding scheme and a number of resource blocks configured for the UE, and used along with a priority of a bearer to determine whether to send a buffer status report for the bearer.