A Novel Two-Stage Fusion Detector Based On Maximum Ratio Combining And Max-Log Rules

A two-stage decision fusion detector at the decision fusion center is presented for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless sensor network. The proposed detector consists of the Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) rule in the first stage and the Max-Log rule in the second stage. The multistage detector was motivated by complexity reduction while preserving the performance optimality of MRC and Max-Log rules. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed approach can assure the performance optimality over low and high signal-to-noise-ratio regime, while reducing computational complexity of the Max-Log rule.