Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide techniques and apparatuses for providing an expanded search space for a relay-specific control channel on a backhaul link. According to certain aspects, due to inband interference, a Relay Physical Downlink Control Channel (R-PDCCH) may be signaled utilizing resources reserved for backhaul data. According to certain aspects, a two-dimensional search space may be provided for R-PDCCH. R-PDCCH may be transmitted in one of a plurality of layer-specific search spaces corresponding to one of a plurality of antenna ports. Further, in a layer-specific search space, R-PDCCH may be transmitted using at least one of multiple R-PDCCH decoding candidates from a common search space and/or a relay node-specific search space.