System and method for sharing a control channel for carrier aggregation

A method for processing a control channel at a user agent (UA) to identify at least one of an uplink or a downlink resource allocated by a resource grant within a multi-carrier communication system wherein resource grants are specified by control channel element (CCE) subset candidates, comprising:

• determining locations of CCE subset candidates for each carrier;
• receiving downlink control information (DCI) signaling;
• determining whether at least one CCE subset candidate at a specific aggregation level corresponds to no more than one carrier, and
• if at least one CCE subset candidate at the specific aggregation level corresponds to no more than one carrier, decoding all DCI signaling corresponding to the specific aggregation level, wherein none of the DCI signaling corresponding to the specific aggregation level includes a CIF;
• and
• if all CCE subset candidates at the specific aggregation level correspond to more than one carrier, decoding all DCI signaling corresponding to the specific aggregation level for a subframe by identifying a CIF within each of the DCI signaling;
• and using the CIF to identify carriers associated with the CCE subset candidate.

A method for processing a control channel at a user agent (UA) to identify at least one of an uplink or a downlink resource allocated by a resource grant within a multi-carrier communication system wherein resource grants are specified by control channel element (CCE) subset candidates, comprising:

• determining locations of CCE subset candidates for each carrier;
• receiving downlink control information (DCI) signaling;
• determining whether at least one CCE subset candidate at any of a plurality of aggregation levels corresponds to no more than one carrier, and
• if at least one CCE subset candidate at any of the plurality of aggregation levels corresponds to no more than one carrier, decoding all DCI signaling corresponding to each of the plurality of aggregation levels, wherein none of the DCI signaling includes a CIF;
• and
• if all CCE subset candidates correspond to more than one carrier, decoding each DCI signaling at each of the plurality of aggregation levels for a subframe by identifying a CIF within each DCI signaling;
• and using the CIFs to identify carriers associated with the CCE subset candidates.