  The Internet of Things (IoT) could enable the development of cloud
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems where internet-enabled devices
can work as distributed transmission/reception entities. We expect that spatial
multiplexing with distributed reception using cloud MIMO would be a key factor
of future wireless communication systems. In this paper, we first review
practical receivers for distributed reception of spatially multiplexed transmit
data where the fusion center relies on quantized received signals conveyed from
geographically separated receive nodes. Using the structures of these
receivers, we propose practical channel estimation techniques for the
block-fading scenario. The proposed channel estimation techniques rely on very
simple operations at the received nodes while achieving near-optimal channel
estimation performance as the training length becomes large.
