A Central High-speed Lane Routing Protocol for Flow-Guided Intra-body Nanonetworks

The development of nanotechnology in recent years makes intra-body flow-guided nanonetworks more feasible. Monitoring different biomarkers, detecting infectious agents, locating cancerous cells, delivering drugs accurately and other medical application are under study. Taking the consideration of the laminar blood flow feature of blood vessels, where concentric layers of blood with different velocities move along in the length of the vessels and the central layer (i.e., lane) has the highest velocity, this paper proposes a central high-speed lane routing protocol, which selects nano-nodes with high speed in the central layer of blood flow and forms a directional relaying chain for other non-central nano-nodes. This protocol helps improve the throughput and success rate of the nanonetworks with high node density and the utilization and life cycle of the nano-nodes. The protocol is simulated under the blood vessel model combined with laminar movement model in Nano-Sim platform, and has been proven its great performance.

I. Introduction

The advancement of nanotechnology has stimulated the innovation of nanoscale devices [1], which can be designed to range from a few hundred nanometers [2]. The utilization of these nanoscale devices circulating in the bloodstream that equipped with chemical and biological nano sensors to monitor different biomarkers, detect infectious agents, locate cancerous cells and deliver drugs accurately [3]–[5] can revolutionize healthcare and patients prognosis. In order to have an effective solution, these nanoscale devices should communicate with each other or transmit information to other nano-devices, such as nano-gateways, and an intra-body flow-guided nanonetwork is formed [5]. These nanoscale devices are also called nano-nodes. For the purpose of forming a network, graphene-based nanoantennas are installed in the nanoscale devices that radiate Electromagnetic (EM) waves, and the Terahertz (0.1-10 THz) frequencies is broadly taken as one of the most prospective enablers, due to the characteristics of graphene and great information carrying capacity of THz band [6]. An ideal health-care system using intra-body flow-guided nanonetwork is shown in Fig. 1.