Receive spatial coding for distributed diversity

We consider a distributed reception scenario where the transmitter transmits a signal and multiple geographically separated receive nodes forward the processed version (using only a small number of bits) of their received signal to the fusion center. The fusion center tries to decode the transmitted signal only based on the forwarded bits from the distributed nodes. We show that there is a strong connection between distributed reception and channel coding and develop the unified framework of coded diversity techniques for distributed reception. To enable efficient encoding at the distributed nodes, we focus on linear block codes that achieve the Griesmer bound with equality to have the maximum diversity gain.