A system and methodology are presented for exploiting channel correlation in time and/or frequency to reduce CQI feedback in wireless communications systems. By compressing CQI feedback at the receiver to reduce redundancy in CQI feedback information that results from the channel correlation, the average feedback rate is reduced. Redundancy in time may be removed from the CQI feedback by monitoring variations of the CQI information in time at the receiver so that CQI information for a given CQI reporting instance is communicated to the transmitter only if it differs from the CQI information for the previous CQI reporting instance. CQI feedback is compressed by performing a discrete cosine transform (DCT) on the CQI data and then communicated to the transmitter through the feedback control channel where it is decoded into the original CQI information and used to generate signal processing information for various sub-carriers.