Pulse Arrival Scheduling for Nanonetworks Under Limited IoT Access Bandwidth

Electromagnetic Wireless Nano Sensor Networks (EM-WNSNs) with molecule-level sensing capacity benefit a wide range of applications that demand high resolution. To accommodate the potentially high data volume, small antenna size, and limited energy capacity, the high-speed TeraHertz (THz) pulses sparsely distributed over time are adopted for communications among nano devices. For EM-WNSNs connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), matching the throughput of nanonetworks and the IoT access bandwidth is significant for resource utilization efficiency. On the one hand, high throughput from nano sensors are limited by IoT access bandwidth, which results in low energy efficiency of EM-WNSNs when traffic regulation mechanisms are applied. On the other hand, low throughput from nanonetworks under utilize the allocated access bandwidth. To enable efficient data forwarding towards the access network, the EM-WNSNs throughput must match the IoT access bandwidth. For this purpose, the Adaptive Pulse Interval Scheduling (APIS) scheme, which schedules the arrival pattern of pulses transmitted by nano sinks based on the access bandwidth, is proposed for event-based EM-WNSNs. From performance evaluation and modelling, APIS implements data forwarding with high energy efficiency for nanonetworks and high bandwidth efficiency for IoT access networks. To the best of our knowledge, APIS is the first pulse level access scheduling solution for EM-WNSNs connected to the IoT.