Patent ID: 8718201

Claim:
A demodulation method for encoded control messages, comprising: at a given user equipment device, receiving one or more Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) symbols over a control channel, wherein the OFDM symbols comprise a plurality of resource element groups distributed in time and frequency that are combined to form a plurality of control channel elements; calculating for each resource element group an index to a corresponding control channel element based on an indexing scheme employed at a base station configured to transmit the one or more of OFDM symbols; identifying a first subset of resource element groups and a second subset of resource element groups from among the plurality of resource element groups based on the calculated resource element group indices, wherein the first subset is used to form specific control channel elements for the given user equipment device and the second subset is used to form common control channel elements for one or more user equipment devices including the given user equipment device; discarding resource element groups that are not identified in the first and second subsets of resource element groups; and demodulating the first and second subsets of resource element groups in order to generate the encoded control messages comprising one or more control channel elements.