Abstract
Thanks to nanotechnology, it is now possible to fabricate sensor nodes below 100 nanometers in size. Although wireless communication at this scale has not been successfully demonstrated yet, simulations confirm that these sensor nodes would be able to communicate in the terahertz band using graphene as a transmission antenna. These developments suggest that deployment of wireless nanoscale sensor networks (WNSNs) inside human body could be a reality one day. In this paper, we design and analyse a WNSN for monitoring human lung cells. We find that respiration, i.e., the periodic inhalation and exhalation of oxygen and carbon dioxide, is the major process that influences the terahertz channel inside lung cells. The channel is characterised as a two-state channel, where it periodically switches between good and bad states. Using real human respiratory data, we find that the channel absorbs terahertz signal much faster when it is in bad state compared to good state. Our simulation experiments confirm that we could reduce transmission power of the nanosensors, and hence the electromagnetic radiation inside lungs due to deployment of WNSN, by a factor of 20 if we could schedule all communication only during good channel states. We propose two duty cycling protocols along with a simple channel estimation algorithm that enables nanosensors to achieve such scheduling.
Highlights
Recent advancements in nanotechnology has made it possible to fabricate sensor nodes below 100 nanometers in size using various types of novel materials
For a given Bit Error Rate (BER), Smart Sleep & Wake-up Protocol (SSW) and Extended Smart Sleep & Wake-up Protocol (ESSW) reduce the required power by a factor of averagely 20 and 18, compared to the default protocol. We hypothesize that this lower performance of the ESSW is due to the variation in the respiration times, Tx which has been considered fixed in equation 5
We have presented the concept of a wireless nanoscale sensor networks (WNSNs) for monitoring human lung cells
Summary
Recent advancements in nanotechnology has made it possible to fabricate sensor nodes below 100 nanometers in size using various types of novel materials. These nanosensors have extra-ordinary sensing capabilities and can sense a range of information at molecular level. When sensing is combined with these nanoparticles, they can collect a range of valuable cell-level data for early detection of diseases. Wireless communication for such nanosensors will be a key enabler for such cell-level data collection from human body
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