Methods and apparatus are provided for constructing scheduling assignments for transmission, by a User Equipment (UE), of data signals over a single contiguous bandwidth and multiple non-contiguous clusters of contiguous bandwidth. The scheduling assignments for each transmission structure are designed to always result into the same maximum number of decoding operations the UE needs to perform to receive the scheduling assignments. The data signal transmission over the single contiguous bandwidth can be with or without frequency hopping and the data signal transmission over the multiple non-contiguous clusters of contiguous bandwidth may always be without frequency hopping.