A method and apparatus for tree position adaptive SOMA receiver structures are disclosed herein. In one embodiment, a device for use in a wireless communication system comprises a receiver to receive information-bearing signals from the transmitter wirelessly transmitted using OFDM and bit interleaved coded modulation, where the receiver includes 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, and wherein the SOMA-based MIMO joint demapper is operable to search a detection tree for each tone using a tree-search symbol order that is adapted for each tone based on channel state information and extrinsic information from the outer decoder, where only a number of best alternatives from every level of the tree are expanded.