Abstract
Continuous progress of nanocommunications and nano-networking is opening the door to the development of innovative yet unimaginable services, with a special focus on medical applications. Among several nano-network topologies, flow-guided nanocommunication networks have recently emerged as a promising solution to monitoring, gathering information, and data communication inside the human body. In particular, flow-guided nano-networks display a number of specific characteristics, such as the type of nodes comprising the network or the ability of a nano-node to transmit successfully, which significantly differentiates them from other types of networks, both at the nano and larger scales. This paper presents the first analytical study on the behavior of these networks, with the objective of evaluating their metrics mathematically. To this end, a theoretical framework of the flow-guided nano-networks is developed and an analytical model derived. The main results reveal that, due to frame collisions, there is an optimal number of nano-nodes for any flow-guided network, which, as a consequence, limits the maximum achievable throughput. Finally, the analytical results obtained are validated through simulations and are further discussed.
Highlights
Recent advances in nanotechnology are laying the foundations for the development of novel medical applications that can significantly improve the effectiveness of disease diagnosis and treatment [1,2,3,4,5]
In this paper, we propose a general analytical model to mathematically evaluate different metrics of flow-guided nano-networks
Network parameters for these simulations are based on those of [7], where the authors modeled a flow-guided nano-network inside the human body
Summary
Recent advances in nanotechnology are laying the foundations for the development of novel medical applications that can significantly improve the effectiveness of disease diagnosis and treatment [1,2,3,4,5]. One of the most promising techniques is based on the deployment of size-constrained devices endowed with a wireless communication module, known as nano-nodes, inside the human body, where larger devices would be inappropriate or excessively invasive. These nano-nodes, measured in micrometers, could be injected into the bloodstream providing real time in-vivo measurements of different elements present in the blood. Each nano-node could be equipped with a nano-sensor similar to that proposed in [6], enabling the detection of cancer biomarkers at an early stage This type of nano-network, in which nano-nodes continuously move within a well-defined flow, is known as a flow-guided nanocommunication network [7]. As the miniaturization of the radiating antenna integrated into each nano-node demands the use of high frequencies to communicate (around 1 THz [2,8]), the attenuation of electromagnetic signals within the human body (largely made up of water) is very high [9,10]
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