Patent ID: 8724648

Claim:
A method comprising: composing downlink control information having a format configured to support a presence of a plurality of transport blocks in a single subframe, wherein the downlink control information comprises, for the plurality of transport blocks, a common resource allocation field, a common modulation/coding scheme field, and a single cyclic redundancy check field, and wherein the downlink control information further comprises transport block specific fields comprising a resource/modulation coding scheme offset value for each transport block for enabling a relay node to determine those resources among the total granted resources that are allocated to each transport block based on the common resource allocation field and the resource/modulation coding scheme offset value, and enabling the relay node to determine the modulation/coding scheme allocated to each transport block based on the common modulation/coding scheme field and the resource/modulation coding scheme offset value; and transmitting the composed downlink control information to the relay node over a wireless link that comprises a backhaul link from the relay node.