Performance Evaluation of Routing Protocols in Electromagnetic Nanonetworks

Revolutionary advancement in realizing nano-sensors promises unprecedented enhancement of applications in several fields, such as health, industry, agriculture, environment, and sport. The small size of nano-sensors and their THz band leads to significant constraints in energy, memory, processing, and transmission range. Recent progress and active research in nano-sensing technology have tackled these constraint and led to increasing interest in connecting these nano-sensors in a new network technology, the nanonetwork. Communication in nano-networks still poses a non-trivial challenge owing to the constraint of processing, storage, energy, and communication range capabilities of nano-nodes. Short communication range in the THz band renders direct communication in nano-networks infeasible most of the time. Hence, multihop communication among nano-nodes is currently regarded as the viable solution for nano-network realization. In this paper, we investigate three routing protocols: controlled flooding, coordinate/routing for nanonetworks, and hierarchical ad hoc on demand distance vector. We evaluate the performance of the three protocols with respect to energy consumption and network delay against transmission range and network density.