Intrabody hybrid perpetual nanonetworks based on simultaneous wired and wireless nanocommunications

Abstract

Recent advancements in nanotechnology opened the doors for the realization of nanometer-sized integrated devices called nanobots with sensing, actuation, data processing and storage, and communication capabilities. The communication of the nanobots in the sense of intrabody nanonetworks allows possibilities of innovative medical applications for monitoring, drug delivery, and nanosurgery inside the human body. Due to their incredibly small sizes, the nanobots have to operate under extreme computational and energy constraints. Nanobots are self-powered by harvesting energy from their ambient (blood vessels) and their energy is mainly used for the transmission and reception of wireless communication signals. Thus, energy management is very important for the feasibility of the intrabody nanonetworks by directly impacting their performance and reliability. In this paper, we propose a hybrid wired/wireless intrabody ultra-dense nanonetwork architecture where the nearby nanobots form temporarily wired clusters reducing the required total wireless transmission and reception in the network leading to the lower energy use of the communication. We consider the use of coaxial nanocables terminated by nanomagnets to form nano-wired clusters with self-aligned and binding magnetic nanoplugs. Due to the highly dynamic topology of these nano-wired clusters, we propose a very lightweight and adaptable clustering and energy management algorithm to select cluster heads on-the-fly and transmit data wiredly in the cluster and wirelessly between the clusters. We investigate the performance impact of the proposed hybrid solution with the means of extensive simulations in the NS-3 platform and the Nano-sim tool. The results show up to three times more packet delivery on high nanobot densities with the proposed hybrid approach leading to much higher network reliability.