A Brief Survey on Molecular and Electromagnetic Communications in Nano-Networks

Abstract

Recent advancement in physics and nanotechnology have paved the way for manufacturing of processor, memory, batteries, transceiver, antenna and sensing units at nano-scale. A nanomachine is an integrated device with dimensions in nano-scale, and able to do simple tasks. By networking of nano-machines, they are able to perform the more complicated tasks by the cooperative manner and can play an important role in applications such as biomedical, environmental monitoring, industrial and military. Many novel nano-scale communication options have been currently proposed. However, there are four main nano-scale communication techniques: nanomechanical, acoustic, chemical or molecular and electromagnetic communications. However, this paper focuses on the molecular and electromagnetic communications as the promising nanoscale communication approaches, and then will be reviewed the novel nano-scale communication paradigms that are currently presented.

New Trends in Stochastic Geometry for Wireless Networks: A Tutorial and Survey

“…One promising frontier of conventional EM communication systems is the ability to share, manipulate and control information on a very small scale in such a way to connect swarms of intelligent autonomous nano-devices, i.e., devices in a scale ranging from 1 to 100 nanometers, e.g., nano-robots, nanoprocessors, nano-clocks. Based on biological communication in nature where molecules are the basic carriers of information, MC is expected to be one of the next big 15 ideas of communication due to its inherent biocompatibility and enhanced EE at the cost of slow propagation speed as compared to EM wave based communications [409], [410].…”

Body-Centric Terahertz Networks: Prospects and Challenges

“…Akyildiz et al [3] 2010 Presents THz communications for NNs, channel modeling, and routing protocols Jornet et al [137] 2012 Introduces the internet of multimedia nanothings (IoMNT), a possible architecture for IoMT, and networking protocols Rikhtegar et al [144] 2013 Studies molecular and electromagnetic communications, nano-devices, and networking for NNs Balasubramaniam et al [139] 2013 Presents various applications of NNs and how to connect the NNs with the outside world Akyildiz et al [3], [4] 2014 Focuses on THz applications at the nano and macro levels and presents possible THz band transceivers and antennas Miraz et al [141] 2015 Overviews connecting the NNs with the internet of things (IoT) and its applications Dressler et al [142] 2015 Focuses on healthcare applications using in-body NNs and presents various networking architectures Petrov et al [145] 2016 Presents an overview of the THz band for future wireless communication networks Rizwan et al [138] 2018 Focuses on big data analytics, such as data gathering, processing, feature extraction, and predictive modeling for healthcare applications Ghafoor et al [135] 2019 Presents applications of the THz band and various MAC layer protocols for THz communications Lemic et al [146] 2019 Focuses on THz communications for NNs and its applications Sarieddeen et al [22] 2020 Presents an overview of THz communication, sensing, imaging, and localization along with their applications This paper 2020 Focuses on the issues of THz devices, communications, and networking for THzband body centric networks, highlighting various applications in the health industry also present the latest research highlighting that THz-band communications can help in pandemic response management by detecting the Coronavirus disease (COVID- 19). We further present various future research challenges for THz-band BCNs and their applications.…”

Molecular Versus Electromagnetic Wave Propagation Loss in Macro-Scale Environments

“…Simple approximate closed form expressions for EM wave propagation are used to show the demarkation between efficient EM wave transmission and efficient molecule transmission. While, recently, a comprehensive research survey [13] has qualitatively described molecular and EM communication in nano-networks, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no quantitative comparison between their loss in different macro-scale channels other than free-space. Thus, the contribution in this paper is to set out the demarcation between efficient EM wave propagation and molecular diffusion, in terms of geometric parameters, EM wave frequency and diffusion parameters.…”