A system and method for transmitting control information are provided. A method for communications controller operations includes combining control data for each relay node of at least one relay node into a control channel data stream, mapping a plurality of transmission resources for the control channel data stream into a plurality of physical resource blocks using a distributed virtual resource mapping rule, and transmitting the plurality of physical resource blocks to the set of at least one relay node. The plurality of transmission resources are mapped to physical resource blocks that are non-contiguous in a frequency domain.