Patent ID: 8359039
Filing Date: 2013-01-22
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method for processing a control channel at a user agent (UA) to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink resource allocated by a resource grant within a multi-carrier communication system wherein resource grants are specified by control channel element (CCE) subsets, wherein each CCE subset is a control channel candidate, the method comprising the steps of: identifying, by the UA, a number of carriers used to communicate with an access device; and based on the number of carriers used to communicate with the access device, identifying, by the UA, a number of control channel candidates to decode, wherein the UA is configured to use different control channel candidates for different numbers of carriers; wherein there are first, second, third and fourth aggregation levels of control channel candidates, when only one carrier is used to communicate with the UA, the numbers of control channel candidates for the first, second, third and fourth aggregation levels are A wherein, when two or more carriers are used to communicate with the UA, the numbers C where B 1 , B 2 , B 3 and B 4 are scaling parameters and N is the number of carriers.