1. A method of wireless communication in a wireless network, the method comprising: determining cell-antenna pairs associated with received transmissions in a received signal; grouping the cell-antenna pairs into groups, each group including cell-antenna pairs with pilot tones that occupy the same time-frequency resource; ranking the groups according to a determined metric; assigning a number of iterations to each ranked group; and performing, by a processor, channel estimation using iterative cancellation, in which received transmissions from cell-antenna pairs in a higher ranked group are iterated first, and received transmissions from cell-antenna pairs are iterated over an assigned number of times for each respective cell-antenna pair.