A method and system transmits a stream of data symbols in a
multiple-input/multiple-output wireless communications system that
includes M pairs of transmitting antennas. The stream of data symbols are
demultiplexed into M sub-streams and adaptively modulated and coded to a
maximum data rate while achieving a predetermine performance on an
associated channel used to transmit the sub-stream. Space-time transmit
diversity encoding is applied to each coded sub-stream to generate two
output streams, one output stream for each antenna.