Information fusion by utilizing multiple distributed sensors is studied in this work. Extending the classical parallel fusion structure by incorporating the fading channel layer that is omnipresent in wireless sensor networks, we derive the likelihood ratio based fusion rule given fixed local decision devices. This optimum fusion rule, however, requires perfect knowledge of the local decision performance indices as well as the fading channel. To address this issue, two alternative fusion

more »

... , namely, the maximum ratio combining statistic and a two-stage approach using the Chair-Varshney fusion rule, are proposed that alleviate these requirements and are shown to be the low and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) equivalents of the likelihood-based fusion rule. To further robustify the fusion rule and motivated by the maximum ratio combining statistics, we also propose a statistic analogous to an equal gain combiner that requires minimum a priori information. Performance evaluation is performed both analytically and through simulation. Index Terms-Decision fusion, diversity combining, fading channel, wireless sensor networks.