The present invention provides a method for mitigating outages in wireless communication systems using feedback for control channels formed by aggregating groups of resource blocks or resource elements, the method. One embodiment of the method includes generating control channel feedback at user equipment. The control channel feedback is generated using one or more measurements performed on signals received at the user equipment over a downlink control channel at a current aggregation level. The method also includes transmitting the control channel feedback over an uplink channel and using this information for the optimal implementation of Cell range expansion by the network.