A wireless communication method and system for performing bit-interleaved coded modulation and iterative decoding. The system includes a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter encodes incoming bits to generate coded bits, punctures the coded bits in accordance with a predetermined puncturing pattern to generate surviving channel bits and stolen bits and interleaves the surviving bits into interleaved surviving bits. The interleaved surviving bits are mapped to channel symbols and the stolen bits are interleaved to generate interleaved stolen bits. At least one of a plurality of antennas is selected to transmit the channel symbols based on the value of the interleaved stolen bits. The receiver receives the transmitted channel symbols, estimates a posteriori probability for both the channel symbols and the stolen bits, and retrieves information of the stolen bits by determining the selected antenna used to transmit the channel symbols.