a mobile terminal 104 a k a user equipment ue 104 to access network 110 as described above in some communication systems ue 104 must transmit to a network node 102 a request to access network 110 prior to transmitting traffic to network 110 this request may be transmitted as an access burst on a random access channel e g a physical random access channel prach as also discussed above when ue 104 transmits a message e g an access burst to a network node 102 using the random access channel ue 104 should select a preamble to include in the message as further discussed above it would be advantageous if ue 104 can intelligently select a preamble without significantly increasing the likelihood of a preamble collision referring now to fig2 fig2 is a flow chart illustrating a process 200 according to some embodiments performed by ue 104 for randomly accessing a network node 102 process 200 may begin in step 202 where ue 104 determines whether it needs to randomly access a network node 102 if it does the process proceeds to step 204 otherwise process 202 may be repeated again in step 204 ue 104 obtains sequence information for example in step 202 ue 104 may receive the sequence information from a network node 102 in some systems each network node periodically broadcasts sequence information for example in some systems each network node broadcasts a logical sequence index and a cyclic shift length.