This work studies the problem of detecting binary hypotheses in distributed systems with a fusion center operating in frequency selective channels. The use of a multiple access technique, referred herein as Chip Spread- Code Division Multiple Access (CS-CDMA), is proposed for orthogonal communication between the nodes and the fusion center and the Bayesian optimum detector for data fusion for such distributed systems is obtained. As the complexity of the optimal detector grows exponentially with the number of sensor nodes, a sub-optimal low-complexity receiver that performs a multi-user matched detection followed by the majority rule is proposed and examined in this work. Blind and assisted techniques for channel estimation necessary for the practical implementation of the matched detection have also been proposed. Simulations indicate that this low complexity receptor has a performance close to the optimal receiver. In order to increase the performance of the matched detector of the fusion center, it was examined the use of cooperation in this sensor network. Simulation results showed that, as expected, the use of cooperation in the distributed system with a multiple access scheme CS-CDMA improves the performance of the fusion center, however, this performance increasing was more significant in environments with few multipath, since the non-cooperative CS-CDMA distributed systems proposed here, efficiently exploits the multipath diversity. Finally, this paper proposes a non-assisted adaptive fusion for distributed systems with centralized fusion. Simulations show that the adaptive fusion strategy has a performance very close to the optimal fusion rule.