  Acoustic reverberation is one of the most relevant factors that hampers the
localization of a sound source inside a room. To date, several approaches have
been proposed to deal with it, but have not always been evaluated under
realistic conditions. This paper proposes exploiting spatial diversity as an
alternative approach to achieve robustness against reverberation. The
theoretical arguments supporting this approach are first presented and later
confirmed by means of simulation results and real measurements. Simulations are
run for reverberation times up to 2 s, thus providing results with a wider
range of validity than in other previous research works. It is concluded that
the use of systems consisting of several, sufficiently separated, small arrays
leads to the best results in reverberant environments. Some recommendations are
given regarding the choice of the array sizes, the separation among them, and
the way to combine SRP-PHAT maps obtained from diverse arrays.
