A 
system employs space-time coding characterized at the 
transmitter by bit-interleaved 
coded modulation (BICM) combined with modulating several streams of the BICM encoded data for transmission over two or more antennas. Space-time coding techniques improve transmission efficiency in radio channels by using multiple transmit and / or receive antennas and coordination of the signaling over these antennas. Bit-interleaved 
coded modulation provides good 
diversity gain with higher-order modulation schemes that employ binary convolutional codes. A 
receiver demodulates the received signals and applies multi-input, multi-output (
MIMO) demapping to estimate the BICM encoded 
bitstream. After deinterleaving of the BICM encoded 
bitstream, maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding is applied to the resulting bit 
stream to generate soft output values. By applying well-known turbo-decoding principles to iteratively demap and decode, the overall 
receiver performance is significantly improved. The 
MIMO demapping and 
MAP decoding processes exchange likelihood information to improve the 
bit error rate performance over several iterations of demapping / decoding. By generating tentative decisions for transmitted bits, the overall number of evaluations used for demapping may be reduced.