Enhanced Clustering Approach for Traffic Regulation in Directional Antennas based Nanonetworks

Wireless NanoNetworks (WNN) are gaining an increasing interest and attracting many researchers from the networking community. This is due to the huge potential offered by nanodevices development. A WNN is formed by a high number of nanonodes utilizing specific properties of nanomaterials and nanoparticles to act at nanometer scale. However, the intrinsic limitations of nanonodes (energy, memory, communication range, and computation capacity), impose WNN protocols to be adapted to these stringent requirements. Furthermore, the extremely high density of nanonodes leads to congestion phenomena, requiring thorough traffic regulation mechanisms in order to reduce hindering radio signal collisions. Traffic regulation aims also to reduce valuable energy consumption. In this paper, we operate with Terahertz directional antennas in order to efficiently direct the radio signals towards the targeted area which significantly reduces interference. For regulating the exchanged messages, we propose a synchronous communication protocol based on a clustering approach where intra and inter cluster communications will be achieved respectively by a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) protocol, and a new distributed TDMA combined with Forwarding Dominate Nodes (FDN) protocol. Several scenarios have been carried out and the obtained simulation results show that our proposition significantly reduces both the number of collisions and the number of exchanged messages required to broadcast data from the nanonodes.