Some wireless communication systems may operate in frequency ranges that are associated with beamformed transmissions between wireless devices. In such systems, a user equipment (UE) may be configured to monitor physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) on multiple beam pair links. In order to decode relevant downlink control information (DCI), a UE may perform multiple blind decodes on a control region of a downlink transmission. Blind decoding may be resource-intensive (e.g., computationally complex, energy consuming, etc.), but some systems may be efficiently designed to support the desired PDCCH monitoring via multiple beam pair links without significantly increasing the number of blind decodes at the UE. Aspects of such a design may include non-uniform candidate restriction, beam pair link-specific search spaces, and random control channel element (CCE) mapping across a candidate search space.