A scheduled data communication system of an access node and terminal supports recurring communications of small data amounts such as Voice over IP (VoIP). In order to make error checking more robust in a random access response (RAR), such as for semi-persistent scheduling (SPS) for VoIP, a portion of a grant or assignment payload has a constraint imposed that can be verified as a condition precedent to determining a valid grant or assignment rather than only relying upon a validity check field, such as a cyclic redundancy check (CRC). Thereby, incorrect validation of a grant or assignment is avoided for dynamic scheduling or for semi-persistent scheduling, the latter causing a persistent error.