Spherical decoder for wireless communications

A decoding scheme for determining the information within a coded transmission includes a spherical decoder candidate search that reduces the number of candidate symbol combinations from a much larger number of possibly transmitted combinations. In one example, the spherical decoder (24) uses an upper triangular matrix (U) representation of the channel matrix (H) as part of a recursive, cumulative cost function that provides the results of the candidate search. The candidate search includes considering symbols in a hierarchy or tree structure (32) that represents the possibly transmitted combinations. The cost function incrementally accumulates a cost of a possible combination as the search progresses through the hierarchy. As soon as a symbol is determined to not be a valid candidate, all possible combinations including that symbol are discarded without considering them, directly.