In accordance with an example embodiment of the present invention, a method comprises scheduling at a wireless network node one or more resources for an uplink backhaul link of a relay node; and applying a mapping scheme to map at least one buffer content to at least one transport block, wherein the mapping scheme comprises determining a transport block index indicator to identify a mapping between the buffer content and the transport block; inserting the transport block index indicator into a resource grant; and transmitting the resource grant to the relay node on a downlink control channel.