In practical communication systems and realistic radio applications, there are throughput and latency restraints that have to be fulfilled together with a fixed hardware decoding complexity constraint that should be satisfied. Because of these requirements, in some bad channel realizations, a guaranteed throughput needs to be enforced with a premature end of the decoding process at the expense of a bit error rate performance penalty. In such scenarios, the decoding algorithm should stop and return a premature estimation of the original data such that the authorized decoding complexity and convergence time are respected. This problem is known as early termination decoding. In this work we propose efficient termination techniques for best-first tree-search sequential decoders applicable to a plurality of linear communication systems including MIMO channels addressed in this paper.