A method and apparatus are provided for a wireless communication system including a base station and at least one user equipment. A Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) table can be generated so that only an index corresponding to the measured CQI needs to be fed back to the base station. The CQI tables proposed herein may be suitable to different channel statistics, different Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) mode and may be optimized based on either performance or implementation complexity. Multiple CQI tables may be formed into one compound CQI table. The CQI tables may be stored at both a base station and user equipment. The base station can select a CQI table from the set of tables. The base station signals the selection of the CQI table to the user equipment and the user equipment feeds back indices from the selected CQI table to the base station.