A method for processing a control channel at a user agent (UA) to identify at least one of an uplink and a downlink resource allocated by a resource grant within a multi-carrier communication system wherein resource grants are specified by control channel element (CCE) subset candidates, the method comprising the steps of identifying the number of configured carriers used to communicate with the access device, based on the number of configured carriers used to communicate with the access device, identifying a number of CCE subset candidates to decode and decoding up to the identified number of CCE subset candidates in an attempt to identify the resource grant.