In order to meet the demands of next-generation wireless systems, which will be required to support multirate multimedia at high data rates, it is necessary to employ advanced algorithms and techniques that enable the system to guarantee the quality of service desired by the various media classes. In this work, we present a few novel methods for improving wireless system performance and achieving next-generation goals. Our proposed methods include finding signal sets that are designed for fading channels and support multirate, exploiting knowledge of the fading statistics during the data detection process, exploiting the existence of Doppler in the received signal, and allowing mobile users to cooperate in order to send their information to the base station. We evaluate the performance of our proposed ideas and show that they provide gains with respect to conventional systems. The benefits include multirate support, higher data rates, and more stable data rates. It should be mentioned that, while we focus mainly on a CDMA framework for analyzing our ideas, many of these ideas may also be applied to other wireless system environments.