This invention relates to a proposal for power headroom reporting for uplink component carriers for which no uplink resource allocation is scheduled by the eNodeB. The user equipment (UE) calculates a virtual power headroom for the non-scheduled uplink component carrier, based on a virtual uplink resource assignment pre-configured by the UE and eNodeB. According to one embodiment the maximum transmit power of the UE is set to a pre-configured fixed value. Alternatively, the maximum transmit power is calculated by the UE considering the power reduction, while the uplink transmission power is set to zero. The virtual power headroom is then transmitted to the eNodeB, which in turn can infer therefrom the pathloss and/or power-per-resource-block for the non-scheduled uplink component carrier and may also infer the power reduction used by the UE. This allows a more accurate scheduling of future uplink transmissions on said non-scheduled uplink component carrier.