A method for processing a control channel at a user agent (UA) to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink resource grant within a wireless communication system wherein resource grants are received using control channel element (CCE) subsets wherein each CCE subset is a control channel candidate, wherein the UA is configured to decode up to M control channel candidates per time period for single carrier operation, the method comprising the steps of, at the user agent, identifying N control channel candidates that are distributed among C carriers wherein N is less than M×C, attempting to decode each of the N identified control channel candidates to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink resource grant and where a control channel candidate is successfully decoded, using the one of the uplink grant and the downlink grant to facilitate communication.