Abstract: An approach to facilitating positioning operations or other designated tasks performed by mobile stations within a wireless communication network enables individual mobile stations to request “free” or idle time if the mobile station's current operations do not provide sufficient background time to perform the required task. For example, the mobile station might be commanded to perform a positioning computation within a required time limit. If its background processing time is insufficient, the mobile station requests additional idle time from the network, which, if allocated by the network, is used by the mobile station to complete the required processing task. In an exemplary application, a GPRS-based network allocates additional “idle” blocks into the time-multiplexed multiframe structures supporting packet data communications with the mobile station.