Scaling up Routing in Nanonetworks with Asynchronous Node Sleeping

In any network, routing and congestion control protocols play a key role, as they allow packets to reach the intended destination. We are interested in wireless nanonetworks (WNNs), which are networks whose nodes have a nanometric size and can be potentially dense in terms of neighboring nodes. The nodes have limited processing capabilities and power. The objective of this research is to present a fine-grained sleeping mechanism for nodes, whose aim is to reduce node resource usage and thereby increase the network life. We evaluate the sleeping mechanism by presenting the impact of network density on packet reachability and network resources used. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of this mechanism and show that nanonode resources (CPU, memory, energy) can be preserved by decreasing the number of forwarded and ignored packets while ensuring the arrival of the data packets to the destination.