An improved list sphere decoder (ILSD) is proposed based on the conventional list sphere decoder (LSD) and the reduced-complexity maximum likelihood sphere-decoding algorithm. Unlike the conventional LSD with fixed initial radius, the ILSD adopts an adaptive radius to accelerate the list construction. Characterized by low-complexity and radius-insensitivity, the proposed algorithm makes iterative joint detection and decoding more realizable in multiple-antenna systems. Simulation results show that computational savings of ILSD over LSD are more apparent with more transmit antennas or larger constellations, and with no performance degradation. Because the complexity of the ILSD algorithm almost keeps invariant with the increasing of initial radius, the BER performance can be improved by selecting a sufficiently large radius.