A method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium are provided for implementing a control channel on a backhaul link of a relay system. The method can include, for example, hybrid time division multiplexing and frequency division multiplexing a relay-physical downlink control channel and relay-physical downlink shared channel of a backhaul link for a relay node as a hybrid multiplexed set of symbols. The relay-physical downlink control channel can include a semi-statically configured searching space to be searched by the relay node. The method can also include transmitting the hybrid multiplexed set of symbols to the relay node.