A method for operating a communications controller includes selecting a search space configuration out of a set of candidate search space configurations for a user equipment served by the communications controller, wherein the search space configuration specifies one or more search spaces to be monitored out of a set of search spaces, and signaling the selected search space configuration to the user equipment. The method provided in this embodiment can be applied to communication systems, such as V2X, LTE-V, V2V, Internet of Vehicles, MTC, IoT, LTE-M, M2M, Internet of Things, etc.