A wireless transmission system included at least one user equipment and a base station. The base station is operable to form a downlink control information block, modulate the downlink control information, precode the modulated downlink control information, and transmit the precoded, modulated downlink control information on at least one demodulation reference signal antenna port to the at least one user equipment. The precoded, modulated downlink control information is mapped to a set of N1 physical resource block pairs in a subframe from an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing symbol T1 to and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing symbol T2.