This thesis demonstrates the use of designing efficient algorithms and architectures to meet the real-time requirements of future wireless base-station receivers. Next generation receivers will require orders-of-magnitude performance improvements in order to provide support for features such as Multimedia, Quality-Of-Service and extremely high data rates. The sophisticated, compute-intensive algorithms proposed to integrate these features make their real-time implementation difficult on current Digital Signal Processor (DSP)-based receivers. A real-time implementation can be achieved by (1) making the algorithms computationally efficient, without significant loss in error rate performance, (2) task partitioning and (3) designing hardware to exploit available pipelining, parallelism and bit-level computations. Multiuser Channel Estimation and Detection, two of the most compute-intensive baseband tasks in the receiver, are implemented on DSPs for performance evaluation. A reduced complexity iterative channel estimation scheme for slow fading channels is proposed for a fixed point, area-time efficient and real-time VLSI architecture. The multiuser detection algorithm is modified for a simple, pipelined structure. A General Purpose Processor (GPP) or DSP based architecture with reconfigurable support suited for different wireless communication standards is proposed and extensions are developed to accelerate the implementation of wireless communication algorithms.