Aspects of the present disclosure provide synchronization techniques for user equipment (UEs) that may be otherwise unable to support sidelink communication a synchronized UE and may have also lost global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and/or Evolved Node Base Stations (eNBs) as a synchronization source. In such instance, the unsynchronized UE may utilize reference signals (RS) from the data packets received from other UEs to track the timing and perform autonomous timing adjustments based thereon for synchronized packet transmission or reception.