QoS aware molecular activation and communication scheme in molecular nanoscale sensor networks

Abstract

Molecular Nanoscale Sensor Networks (MNSNs) introduce a new molecular routing paradigm where the molecular communication is enabled by activating the nanosensors on the routing path to release the molecules. This new molecular activation mechanism is a new many-to-many scheme where the transmitting nanosensors transmits molecules to multiple receiving nanosensors and the receiving nanosensors receives the molecules from multiple transmitting nanosensors. Molecular activation mechanism poses two new capacity constraints where the received molecules must be above a threshold to activate the receiving node and the molecules released from the transmitter should not exceed its molecular capacity. These two new criteria (many-to-many communication and capacity constraint) make the molecular activation and communication scheme a very challenging issue in an MNSN, which is totally different from the communication and routing scheme in existing wireless IP networks. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a sound mathematical model to capture the many-to-many communication scheme, activation capacity constraint and molecular capacity constraint in the MNSN. We then propose a novel QoS (cost and capacity) aware algorithm, CACAMA, to identify the cost efficient molecular activation and communication path in the MNSN. From the computational experiments, it shows that the CACAMA algorithm is superior to other two heuristics, SP and MCST, in all network settings.