A method, apparatus, and radio receiver system for canceling multi-user interference in a single-carrier radio communication system. A front-end receiver such as a RAKE receiver receives a radio signal formatted in a sequence of frames, and outputs a plurality of user signals. An ordering unit determines for a current frame, an order in which to decode and remove the interference contributions of the plurality of user signals. The order may be based on a list of user signals sorted in the order of descending signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), modified by the success or failure of attempts to decode each user signal. A frame calculator determines a coherence time, which is used to calculate the number of subsequent frames in which the user signals are decoded in the determined order.