A method for processing a control channel at a user agent (UA) to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink resource grant within a wireless communication system wherein resource grants are specified by control channel element (CCE) subsets wherein each CCE subset is a control channel candidate, wherein the control channel is used for a plurality C of carriers, the method comprising the steps of, at the user agent, for each of the C carriers, (i) randomly identifying a UA specific search space including a control channel candidate subset for the carrier and (ii) attempting to decode each of the control channel candidates in the UA specific search space to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink grant associated with the carrier.