An improved technique for encoding and decoding of data for group common control channels is provided herein. Generally, the embodiments disclosed herein involve masking the information bits of the group common PDCCH (or group common control channel information) with the common RNTI, without using parity bits, which reduces the power requirements of the transmitter and receiver. In a first embodiment, the information block and the common RNTI can each be encoded using separate encoders, and then the encoded information block can be masked with the encoded common RNTI, and the resulting code symbol can be transmitted to the group of mobile devices. In a second embodiment, an information block can be appended with bits to match a size of the common RNTI, and then be masked by the common RNTI.