Maximum likelihood detection of signals in a MIMO receiver. A system transformation is obtained by selecting a weighting matrix that when linearly transforming a channel utilized for wireless communication, results in a particular transformed triangular matrix. The weighting matrix is then used to provide a transformed vector for a received signal that allows a search in one constellation. In searching the constellation recursion values are used to calculate the Euclidean distances between set points of the constellation and the location on the constellation corresponding to the received signal for both bit values 0 and 1. Minimum Euclidean distances are determined for bit values 0 and 1 and the difference of the minimum Euclidean distances is used to compute the maximum likelihood value for bits contained in the received signal.