A method and an apparatus in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication system are provided. A signal is received over a channel. The channel is decomposed into a plurality of virtual channels. Symbol detection is performed on each of the plurality of virtual channels using respective symbol detectors. At least one of the symbol detectors has a lower rank than that of the channel. Output from the symbol detectors is combined to obtain final log likelihood ration (LLR) values for layers of the channel. Decoding is performed using the final LLR values to output a decoded symbol value of the received signal.