This paper considers the problem of binary distributed detection of a known
signal in correlated Gaussian sensing noise in a wireless sensor network, where
the sensors are restricted to use likelihood ratio test (LRT), and communicate
with the fusion center (FC) over bandwidth-constrained channels that are
subject to fading and noise. To mitigate the deteriorating effect of fading
encountered in the conventional parallel fusion architecture, in which the
sensors directly communicate with the FC, we propose new fusion architectures
that enhance the detection performance, via harvesting cooperative gain
(so-called decision diversity gain). In particular, we propose: (i) cooperative
fusion architecture with Alamouti's space-time coding (STC) scheme at sensors,
(ii) cooperative fusion architecture with signal fusion at sensors, and (iii)
parallel fusion architecture with local threshold changing at sensors. For
these schemes, we derive the LRT and majority fusion rules at the FC, and
provide upper bounds on the average error probabilities for homogeneous
sensors, subject to uncorrelated Gaussian sensing noise, in terms of
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of communication and sensing channels. Our
simulation results indicate that, when the FC employs the LRT rule, unless for
low communication SNR and moderate/high sensing SNR, performance improvement is
feasible with the new fusion architectures. When the FC utilizes the majority
rule, such improvement is possible, unless for high sensing SNR
