1. A receiver for use in a wireless communication system to receive information-bearing signals from a 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 on the detection tree following the forward pass during which soft-output is computed for each bit using information collected and stored during the first pass, wherein for the forward pass, at each depth of the detection tree, opposite decisionpartial metrics are saved for only a portion of the bits based on early terminated paths and all partial metrics are saved for survivors, where the partial metrics include the longest possible and best available paths, and an outer decoder operable with the SOMA-based inner decoder to perform iterative decoding.