Apparatus and methods are provided for virtual carrier operation in wireless systems with large carrier bandwidth. In one novel aspect, virtual carrier (VC) with a block of physically contiguous radio resources within a component carrier is configured. In one embodiment, the UE configures a downlink (DL) common virtual carrier (CVC) and an uplink (UL) CVC, which carry control information for the UE, and one or more DL/UL dedicated VCs (DVCs), which carry data services. In one embodiment, the UE obtains the CVC configuration information including the channel bandwidth and the physical location through system information. In another embodiment, the UE obtains DVC configuration through an RRC-layer signaling. In another novel aspect, the UE obtains a VC configuration switch command through either a MAC signal or a PHY signal, and subsequently reconfigures one or more configured VCs based on the received switch command.