A method and an apparatus for determining a relay link resource element group are disclosed. The method includes: determining a size of a relay link resource element group according to a pattern of a non-zero-power Channel State Information Reference Signal (CSI-RS), and/or a pattern of a zero-power CSI-RS and/or a pattern of a Common Reference Signal (CRS), and/or a pattern of a Demodulation Reference Signal (DMRS) transmitted in a resource block in which the resource element group locates in allocated resources. The allocated resources are used for a transmission over a relay link physical downlink control channel, including one or more continuously or discretely distributed resource blocks in the frequency domain, while including one or more Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) symbols in the time domain.