A performance evaluation of broadcasting algorithms in Wireless Nanosensor Networks

Abstract

With rapid advances in nanotechnologies, Wireless Nanosensor Networks (WNSNs) have been emerged as a typical subclass of WSNs but at nano-scale. WNSN is a new communication fabric that allows nanonodes to connect to each other using new mechanisms such as molecular (or chemical) and electromagnetic. Unlike traditional WSNs, nanonodes are tiny with limited resources (e.g., computation, memory and energy) and therefore, are not able to communicate with the destination node using a single-hop scenario. The flooding mechanism, in which each node rebroadcasts the message once, was adopted for broadcasting in electromagnetic-based WNSNs. While the flooding mechanism is very simple, it is not efficient since most of the nanonodes are expected to rebroadcast a message at the same time, thus collisions are likely to occur. Furthermore, the excess number of rebroadcasts increases resources utilization that affects the network performance and increases energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate the flooding algorithm in the context of WNSNs and compare it with counter-based and probabilistic-based broadcasting mechanisms that are proposed for MANETs.