1. A receiver for use in a wireless communication system to receive information-bearing signals from the transmitter wirelessly transmitted using OFDM and bit interleaved coded modulation, the receiver comprising: an inner decoder structure having a soft output M-algorithm (SOMA) based multiple-in multiple-out (MIMO) joint demapper that uses a SOMA-based MIMO detection process to perform joint inner demapping over each tone, the SOMA-based MIMO joint demapper being operable to identify a best candidate among a number of candidates by searching a detection tree for each tone using a forward pass through the detection tree, where only a number of best alternatives from every level of the tree are expanded and where soft-output related information is collected and stored, and to perform a second pass, following the forward pass during which soft-output is computed for each bit, and an outer decoder operable with the SOMA-based inner decoder to perform iterative decoding.