Efficient Data Dissemination in Electromagnetic Wireless Nano-Sensor Networks

Recent advances in wireless communications and electronics have enabled the development of nano sensor nodes that are able to process and transmit sensed data. These tiny sensor nodes leverage the idea of nano sensor networks that are expected to find several applications such as health care monitoring, wildlife surveillance, etc. The networking of several nano-devices is still a major open issue. In fact, the very limited transmission ranges in the terahertz band renders direct communication between nano-devices unfeasible most of the time. Hence, multihop communication among nano-nodes is currently regarded as the viable solution for nano-network realization. However, the simplicity and energy constraints of nano-sensor nodes are far from the complexity of classical multi-hop routing and forwarding protocols. On the other hand, researches on dedicated communications protocols for Wireless Nano Sensor Networks (WNSNs) are still in their early stage. In this paper, we propose a geographic routing algorithm for efficient data dissemination in electromagnetic WNSN. We evaluate our solution in the context of a health-monitoring application where multiple nano-devices are deployed in an artery. We compare our proposal to the flooding scheme and results confirm that the geographic routing scheme is scalable and energy efficient without impairing the packet delivery ratio.