A system and method are provided for Soft Interference Cancellation (SIC) in receiving Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) Multiple-Input Multiple Output (MIMO) signals. A receiver with Mr antennas accepts multicarrier signals transmitted simultaneously, with N overlapping carrier frequencies. The receiver removes a cyclic prefix (CP), and fast Fourier transforms (FFT) the multicarrier signal from each antenna, supplying Mr number of N-tone signals y. Using either parallel SIC (P-SIC) or successive SIC (S-SIC), interference is canceled in each of the Mr signals, and soft symbols are supplied for each of U layers. Interference is canceled using the P-SIC process by parallel processing the U layers in an i-th iteration, in response to feedback from an (i−1)th iteration. Alternatively, interference is canceled using the S-SIC process by sequentially processing the U layers in an i-th iteration, in the order of u0,u1, . . . , uU−1, using feedback generated from previously processed layers.