Processing of wireless signals to preserve wireline network resources

In order increase capacity in the wireless domain, the signals from several distributed receivers may be combined. The combining of these signals typically requires transmission over a wireline network. In the wireline domain, signals may be transmitted to a single centralized processing node or may be processed in a distributed fashion at several nodes in the network. We compare, for white Gaussian noise channels, the capacity gains that can be obtained from distributed processing of wireline signals to the capacity gains obtained using maximum likelihood ratio combining at a single processing node. We find that, by using optimal detection techniques, the bandwidth requirements in the wireline domain can be significantly reduced without reducing the capacity in the wireless domain. These gains in capacity are achieved by eliminating transmission of redundant information in the wireline network.