System and method for reducing blind decoding for carrier aggregation

An apparatus for processing a control channel at a user agent (UA) to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink resource grant within a wireless communication system wherein resource grants are received using control channel element (CCE) subsets wherein each CCE subset is a control channel candidate, wherein the UA is configured to decode up to M control channel candidates per time period for single carrier operation, the apparatus comprising:

• a processor programmed to perform the steps of:
• identifying N control channel candidates that are distributed among C carriers wherein N is less than M×C;
• attempting to decode each of the N identified control channel candidates to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink resource grant;
• and
• where a control channel candidate is successfully decoded, using the one of the uplink grant and the downlink grant to facilitate communication.

A method for processing a control channel at an access device to transmit at least one of an uplink and a downlink resource grant within a wireless communication system to a user agent wherein resource grants are specified by control channel element (CCE) subsets wherein each CCE subset is a control channel candidate, wherein a UA is configured to decode up to M control channel candidates per time period for single carrier operation to identify a resource grant, the method comprising the steps of, at the access device:

• (i) identifying N control channel candidates to be associated with the C carriers wherein N is less than M×C;
• (ii) selecting at least one of the N control channel candidate subset candidates to code at least one of an uplink grant and a downlink grant for at least one of the C carriers to be used by a UA;
• (iii) using the selected control channel candidate to code the at least one an uplink grant and a downlink grant;
• and
• (iv) transmitting the grant to the UA via the selected control channel candidate.