Sensor-fusion center communication over multiaccess fading channels

We study the problem of communicating sensor readings over a multiaccess channel. Previous works focused on the approach that each sensor is allocated an orthogonal channel to transmit its data as in TDMA (time-division multiple access). In this paper, we propose an. alternative method in which the sensors transmit simultaneously to deliver a noisy version of the type of sensor observations. We analyze the estimation/detection performance of this type-based multiple access (TBMA) approach in inferring a parameter θ. The data at different sensors are modeled as conditionally independent given θ. An asymptotic performance analysis is presented, and significant gains in estimation/detection performance and bandwidth usage are demonstrated.