In a single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) system that utilizes interleaved FDMA (IFDMA) or localized FDMA, multiple transmitters may transmit their pilots using time division multiplexing (TDM), code division multiplexing (CDM), interleaved frequency division multiplexing (IFDM), or localized frequency division multiplexing (LFDM). The pilots from these transmitters are then orthogonal to one another. A receiver performs the complementary demultiplexing for the pilots sent by the transmitters. The receiver may derive a channel estimate for each transmitter using an MMSE technique or a least-squares technique. The receiver may receive overlapping data transmissions sent on the same time-frequency block by the multiple transmitters and may perform receiver spatial processing with spatial filter matrices to separate these data transmissions. The receiver may derive the spatial filter matrices based on the channel estimates for the transmitters and using zero-forcing, MMSE, or maximal ratio combining technique.