—The EU WINNER projects have studied OFDM-based packet data systems beyond 3G that use adaptivity on all timescales to obtain high flexibility and performance. The adaptive transmission in both downlink and uplink is scheduled and controlled at base stations and relay nodes and requires frequent transmission of control information over the downlink. The use of scheduling, adaptive modulation and coding, with fine granularity in both time and space, could potentially result in unrealistic bandwidth demands for such downlink control signaling. The present paper describes how this problem has been handled within WINNER in two cases: Frequency-adaptive transmission, which allows individual link adaptation within time-frequency resource units and non-frequency adaptive transmission, which averages over the channel variations in the frequency domain. An important tool for limiting the associated control information is to broadcast only a small essential set of control data to all user term...