Techniques described herein assist with indicating whether ACK/NACK signaling is present in an uplink transmission, thereby enhancing performance by permitting use of rate matching while reducing decoding errors. For example, a user equipment may determine whether ACK/NACK signaling is to be included in an uplink transmission in a portion of uplink resources allocated for a data channel, may generate a reference signal that indicates whether the ACK/NACK signaling is present in the uplink transmission, and may transmit the reference signal.