Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide ordering techniques for a Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) receiver which may be used to robustly choose a correct stream for first decode under varying data rates, SNR and mobile propagation conditions in Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems. The SIC ordering techniques discussed in the disclosure include SNR and/or Rate based information theoretic approach. For example, the SIC receiver may evaluate an SNR based or RATE-based information theoretic metric for the MIMO streams and choose one stream with a higher value of the metric for decoding first. A speculative single code block based approach is may also be used for selecting a stream for first decode, by leveraging the presence of per code block Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) and the lack of time diversity in LTE systems.