Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is a well-known technique for mitigating interference. For multiple-layer reception, hard-decision SIC with perfect per-layer rate control has been proven to be a capacity-achieving scheme. In practice, however, due to imperfect rate control and signaling constraints, there is a potential for certain variants of SIC techniques to achieve better performance than the conventional hard-decision SIC approach. In this paper, the benefits of various SIC techniques are studied. We show that a soft SIC scheme that passes information iteratively between equalizer, demodulator, and decoder enhances MIMO reception in downlink LTE.