Various techniques are proposed to enhance or expand the capabilities or usage of buffer status request (BSR) and scheduling request (SR) in new radio (NR) applications. In an implementation, techniques are proposed to extend the SR in long term evolution (LTE) baseline with additional information to help a base station (e.g., gNB) schedule faster and more efficiently. Moreover, a new BSR triggering condition is proposed to report new data based on particular events instead of being time-based. Modifications being proposed to both BSR and SR can be customized for different numerologies/transmission time intervals (TTIs). Modifications being proposed to SR can also be used to indicate a user equipment (UE) new beam selection after recovering from a beam failure.