A mobile station (e.g., an MTC device), an access node (e.g., BSS) and various methods are described herein for implementing an accelerated system access procedure (ASAP) which improves the radio resource utilization efficiency by having: (1) the mobile station transmit a packet channel request to the access node, where the packet channel request includes a unique identifier associated with the mobile station, and (2) the access node after receiving the packet channel request transmits an Immediate Assignment (IA) message to the mobile station, where the IA message includes the unique identifier associated with the mobile station.