Energy-efficient transport layer protocol for hybrid communication in body area nanonetworks

Recent advancement in technology fosters the emergence of Body Area Nanonetworks (BANs) as a new communication paradigm. BANs foreshadow its gleaming applications in diversified fields more specifically in health-care applications such as recognizing and destroying tumors cells via penetration of sensitive body sites. Such applications bolster amalgamation of both molecular and electromagnetic communication leading to the emergence of a hybrid communication leveraging perks of both types of communication. Even though most of the existing studies in the literature mainly focus on lower layers of the protocol stack, i.e., Physical and MAC layers for BANs addressing either type of communication, the design of protocols for upper layers such as Transport layer deploying hybrid communication still remains unexplored to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on developing an energy-efficient transport layer protocol in BANs deploying hybrid communication. Here, we introduce a congestion control mechanism with limited complexity and overhead. Our endeavor is to ensure a delicate balance among different network-level performance metrics such as throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy consumption. We evaluate the efficacy of our proposed protocol in comparison to several state-of-the-art approaches through ns-2 simulation.