3D dynamic ring-based forwarder selection to improve packet delivery in ultra-dense nanonetworks

A nanonetwork is a multi-hop network composed of tiny communicating components, whose energy budget is rather limited. A method to reduce the energy used by nodes is to reduce the number of packets transmitted. In this article, we propose a dynamic 3D scheme to reduce the number of forwarders during routing. In this scheme, potential forwarders are found on a ring around transmitter nodes. We analyze the effectiveness of our 3D scheme for four routing protocols in multi-source scenarios. We analyze its memory cost, both theoretically and by simulation. Results show that the proposed scheme works in 3D, and reduces the number of forwarders while maintaining almost the same packet delivery ratio.