Various embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and system for Vertical Bell Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) detection with near Maximum Likelihood (ML) performance and low complexity. The V-BLAST system is a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system. A receiver is provided that detects the data transmitted from the multiple transmitting antennas. The detection performance of such a method and system is better than that of linear receivers while keeping the complexity of the receiver marginally higher than that of the linear receivers. The detection performance of such a method and system is very close to that of the ML receiver while its complexity is much less than that of the ML receiver.