As the applications of the internet of things are becoming widely diversified, wireless sensor networks require real-time data reception, accommodation of access from several sensors, and low power consumption. In physical wireless parameter conversion sensor networks (PhyC-SN), all the sensors use frequency shift keying as the modulation scheme and then access the channel to the fusion center, simultaneously. As a result, the fusion center can recognize the statistical tendency of all the sensing results at a time from the frequency spectrum of the received signal. However, the information source, i.e., the sensor, cannot be specified from the received signal because no ID-indicating sensor is inserted to the signal. The data-tracking technique for tracing the time continuity of the sensing results is available for decomposing the sequence of the sensing results per sensor but the error tracking, which is a wrong recognition between the sensing results and the sensor, occurs owing to the similarity of the sensing results. This paper proposes the sensing result separation technique using a fractional carrier frequency offset (CFO) for PhyC-SN. In the proposed scheme, the particular fractional CFO is assigned to each user and it is useful for the ID specifying sensor. The fractional CFO causes inter-carrier interference (ICI). The ICI cancellation of the narrowband wireless communications is proposed. The two types of data-tracking techniques are proposed and are selectively used by the fusion center. Since the proposed data-tracking technique is multi-dimensional, high accuracy of data tracking is achieved even under the similar tendency of the sensing results. Based on computer simulation, we elucidate the advantage of the proposed sensing results separation.
Keywords: data tracking; frequency offset; interference cancellation; wireless sensor networks.