Techniques are provided to support successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver processing with selection diversity whereby each of N.sub.T transmit antennas may be turned on or off. One symbol stream may be transmitted from each transmit antenna. A SIC receiver recovers the transmitted symbol streams in a specific order. Up to N.sub.T! orderings are evaluated. For each ordering, N.sub.T post-detection SNRs are obtained for N.sub.T transmit antennas and used to determine N.sub.T data rates, where the data rate is zero if the post-detection SNR is worse than a minimum required SNR. An overall data rate is computed for each ordering based on the N.sub.T data rates. The ordering with the highest overall data rate is selected for use. Up to N.sub.T symbol streams are processed at the data rates for the selected ordering and transmitted. The transmitted symbol streams are recovered in accordance with the selected ordering.