In release 8 of the LTE standard (“Rel-8”), a control channel and its associated data channel for downlink may be found in the same subframe. However, decoding of the control channel may be difficult if there is strong interference from different cells (e.g., due to interference from strong/dominant interfering cells). Communication in a dominant interference scenario may be supported by performing inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC). For example, cells may partition subframes to avoid interference. For some embodiments, allocating resources for a downlink data channel on one subframe may come from a PDCCH on a different subframe, which can be referred to as a cross-subframe assignment. Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide subframe-specific search spaces that may be used when there is at least one cross-subframe assignment in a subframe.