A joint energy harvesting and consumption model for self-powered nano-devices in nanonetworks

Nanotechnology is enabling the development of integrated nano-devices which are able to perform only very simple tasks. Nanonetworks, i.e., networks of nano-devices, will enable advanced applications of nanotechnology in the biomedical, environmental and military fields. One of the major bottlenecks in nanonetworks is posed by the very limited energy that can be stored in a nano-battery in contrast to the energy that is required by a nano-device to operate and, specially, to communicate. Recently, novel energy harvesting mechanisms have been proposed to replenish the energy stored in the nano-batteries. With these mechanisms, nanonetworks can overcome their energy bottleneck and even have infinite lifetime. In this paper, an energy model for self-powered nano-devices is developed that successfully captures the correlation between the energy harvesting and the energy consumption processes. The energy harvesting process is realized by means of a piezoelectric nano-generator, for which a new circuital model is developed which can accurately reproduce existing experimental data. The energy consumption process is due to the communication among nano-devices in the Terahertz Band (0.1-10 THz). A mathematical framework is developed to obtain the probability distribution of the nano-device energy and to investigate the end-to-end successful packet delivery probability, the end-to-end packet delay, and the throughput in nanonetworks. Integrated nano-devices have not been built yet and, thus, the development of an analytical energy model is a fundamental step towards the design of architectures and protocols for nanonetworks.