Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate allocating uplink resources to mobile devices to employ to signal acknowledgment indicators. Persistently scheduled mobile devices can be explicitly assigned uplink resources. Dynamically scheduled mobile device can utilize a one-to-one mapping to identify uplink resources based upon a downlink control channel index. The one-to-one mapping can be revised to remove associations between downlink control channel indices and resources allocated to persistently scheduled users and/or reserved for other control signaling in a mixed resource block. In addition, downlink control channel indices can be selected to avoid collisions between dynamic and persistent users.