PHLAME: A physical layer aware MAC protocol for electromagnetic nanonetworks

Nanotechnology is enabling the development of integrated devices just a few hundred nanometers in size. Communication among these nano-devices will boost the applications of nanotechnology in the biomedical, environmental and military fields. Within the communication alternatives at the nanoscale, the state of the art in nanomaterial research points to the Terahertz band (0.1-10 THz) as the frequency range of operation of graphene-based electromagnetic (EM) nano-transceivers. This frequency band supports very large transmission bit-rates and enables simple communication mechanisms suited to the limited capabilities of nano-devices. Due to an expectedly very large number of nano-devices sharing the same channel, it is necessary to develop new Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols which will be able to capture the peculiarities of nanonetworks in the Terahertz band. In this paper, PHLAME, a physical layer aware MAC protocol for electromagnetic nanonetworks, is introduced. This protocol is built on top of a novel communication scheme based on the exchange of femtosecond-long pulses spread in time, and exploits the benefits of novel low-weight channel coding schemes. In the PHLAME protocol, the transmitting and receiving nano-devices jointly select the communication parameters that minimize the interference in the nanonetwork and maximize the probability of successfully decoding the received information. The performance of the protocol is analyzed in terms of energy consumption, delay and achievable throughput, by taking also into account the energy limitations of nano-devices. The results show that, despite its simplicity, the PHLAME protocol is able to support densely populated nanonetworks by exploiting the peculiarities of the Terahertz band.