A base station is provided. The base station includes a transmit path circuitry to transmit an uplink grant to a subscriber station, the uplink grant indicating a first modulation and coding scheme (MCS) value for a first codeword transmission and a second MCS value for a second codeword transmission. The base station also includes a receive path circuitry to receive a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) uplink subframe from the subscriber station, the MIMO uplink subframe having a first subset of layers used for the first codeword transmission and a second subset of layers used for the second codeword transmission. Acknowledgement/negative acknowledgement (ACK/NACK) information and rank indication (RI) information are mapped onto both the first subset of layers and the second subset of layers. Channel quality information (CQI) is only mapped onto either the first subset of layers or the second subset of layers.