Nanorouter awareness in flow-guided nanocommunication networks

Abstract

Flow-guided electromagnetic nanonetworks will enable innovative medical applications for monitoring, information gathering, and data transmission inside the human body. These nanonetworks will have to operate under extreme computational and powering-related constraints, and in very hostile environments inside human vascular systems. Under these circumstances, successful transmissions between in-body nanonodes and an on-body nanorouter rarely occur, thus requiring new approaches to improve the network throughput in this scenario. Along this view, in classical flow-guided nanonetworks the nanonodes are envisioned to transmit packets if they have enough energy for the transmission, regardless of their vicinity to the nanorouter. In this paper, we propose a nanorouter awareness model that can provide significant throughput gains compared to the baseline based on blind transmissions, facilitating the roll-out of nanocommunication-supported medical applications.