Reliability and Delay Analysis of Multihop Virus-Based Nanonetworks

Molecular communication is a new communication paradigm that allows nanomachines to communicate using biological mechanisms and/or components to transfer information (e.g., molecular diffusion, molecular motors). One possible approach for molecular communication is through the use of virus particles that act as carriers for nucleic acid-based information. This paper analyzes multihop molecular nanonetworks that utilize virus particles as information carrier. The analysis examines the physiochemical and biological characteristics of virus particles such as diffusion, absorption, and decay, and how they affect the reliability of multihop communication in molecular nanonetworks. The paper also analyzes the use of a simple implicit acknowledgement protocol for a single-path topology, and compare its performance to defined and random multipath topologies that do not use acknowledgments. Numerical results show that commensurate reliability is achievable for single-path with implicit acknowledgement and multipath topologies. However, the single-path topology exhibits increased communication delay and more uncertain end-to-end communication time.