PHLAME: A Physical Layer Aware MAC protocol for Electromagnetic nanonetworks in the Terahertz Band

Nanonetworks will enable advanced applications of nanotechnology in the biomedical, industrial, environmental and military fields, by allowing integrated nano-devices to communicate and to share information. Due to the expectedly very high density of nanodevices in nanonetworks, novel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are needed to regulate the access to the channel and to coordinate concurrent transmissions among nano-devices. In this paper, a new PHysical Layer AwareMAC protocol for Electromagnetic nanonetworks in the Terahertz Band (PHLAME) is presented. This protocol is built on top of a novel pulse-based communication scheme for nanonetworks and exploits the benefits of novel low-weight channel coding schemes. In PHLAME, the transmitting and receiving nano-devices jointly select the optimal communication scheme parameters and the channel coding scheme which maximize the probability of successfully decoding the received information while minimizing the generated multi-user interference. 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 PHLAME, by exploiting the properties of the Terahertz Band and being aware of the nano-devices’ limitations, is able to support very densely populated nanonetworks with nano-devices transmitting at tens of Gigabit/second. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.