Energy harvesting-based thermal aware routing protocol for lung terahertz nanosensor networks

Lung damage caused by viral infections such as COVID-19, MERS, and SARS can lead to serious or even fatal conditions. Therefore, monitoring lung diseases at the nanoscale has great potential for development. Some biomedical sensors implanted in the human body can generate electromagnetic radiation, and excessive emission power may pose a serious threat to tissues in the human body. Therefore, while constructing lung wireless nanosensor network (WNSN), we need to consider the limited energy storage and potential thermal effects of nanosensors. In this paper, an energy harvesting-based thermal aware routing (EHTAR) protocol is proposed. The protocol introduces a piezoelectric energy harvesting system to charge the nanonodes and proposes a sleep-wake mechanism for node temperature and energy to establish a next-hop link cost function using node temperature, remaining energy, and distance as cost factors. Simulation results demonstrate that EHTAR makes the node temperature not exceed the set threshold and the energy harvesting mechanism can greatly extend the network survival, so EHTAR can be better applied in the lung health monitoring scenario.