An integrated diversity and fusion framework for binary consensus over fading channels

In this paper, we consider a cooperative network that is trying to reach consensus on the occurrence of an event by communicating over not fully connected and time-invariant network topologies with fading channels. We first discuss the fusion and diversity decision-making strategies over time-invariant network topologies and shed light on the underlying trade-offs. We then propose an integrated diversity and fusion framework. Our approach properly takes advantage of both fusion to enable information flow and diversity to increase robustness to link errors. We mathematically analyze the proposed framework and show how the network achieves accurate consensus asymptotically. To show an example, we then utilize the proposed framework over regular ring lattice networks. Our theoretical and simulation results indicate that the proposed technique improves the consensus performance considerably.