Distributed reception of fading signals in noise

A multiple antenna diversity scheme is investigated for digital wireless communications. In this scheme the antenna observations are immediately quantized and only the quantized values are sent to a fusion center to decide which symbol was transmitted. The case where fine quantization is impractical is considered, so that distributed detection principles apply. The optimum reception scheme is described for the case where frequency shift keying is employed. Multiple bit quantization schemes are considered for cases where the observations at each antenna are influenced by slow Rayleigh fading and Gaussian additive noise. Some numerical results are provided