An apparatus and method facilitating communication using reduced bandwidth NR transmissions, where some part of the bandwidth defined by the CORESET is punctured and not available for the reduced bandwidth NR signals. The user equipment receiving these signals determines that puncturing is applied to some frequency domain resource elements within the bandwidth and identifies at least one valid candidate resource within the bandwidth. The at least one valid candidate resource comprises a candidate resource with less than at least one predetermined threshold amount of punctured resource elements. The user equipment then only monitors a subset of the plurality of candidate resources, the subset consisting of the at least one valid candidate resource and skips monitoring of the candidate resources that it deems to be invalid.