Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate unified, low-complexity processing (e.g., user separation and noise estimation) of a control channel. One or more UEs can respectively transmit one or more control signals, which are multiplexed on a control channel and a base station can receive a control channel signal that includes the one or more control signals. The base station, in a single pass, can separate the control signals by matching the control channel signal with a base sequence and translating the matched signal to a time-domain representation. In the time-domain representation, each control signal resides at a different tap. Further, the base station can identify taps of the time-domain representation corresponding to an unused cyclic shift or orthogonal cover sequence. Such taps can be employed to generate a noise and/or interference estimate.