A user equipment (UE) in communication with a base station may receive downlink control information (DCI) on a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH). The UE may receive a configuration of the PDCCH. The UE may determine a number of downlink PDCCH candidates and a number of uplink PDCCH candidates within a search space based on the configuration, wherein the number of downlink PDCCH candidates is different than the number of uplink PDCCH candidates, and a length of each downlink PDCCH candidate is different than a length of each uplink PDCCH candidate. The UE may blindly decode the search space with each PDCCH candidate as a hypothesis to determine whether any of the downlink PDCCH candidates or uplink PDCCH candidates decode to a DCI format.