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 specified by control channel element (CCE) subsets wherein each CCE subset is a control channel candidate wherein the control channel is used for a plurality C of carriers, the apparatus comprising:

• a user agent including a processor that is programmed to perform the steps of, for each of the C carriers:
• (i) randomly identifying a UA specific search space including a control channel candidate subset for the carrier;
• and
• (ii) attempting to decode each of the control channel candidates in the UA specific search space to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink grant associated with the carrier.

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 the control channel is used for a plurality C of carriers, the method comprising the steps of, at the access device:

• for each of the C carriers:
• (i) randomly identifying a UA specific search space including a control channel candidate subset for the carrier;
• and
• (ii) using at least one of the control channel candidate subset candidates to transmit at least one of an uplink grant and a downlink grant to a UA.