Enhancement and performance analysis of channel access mechanisms in Terahertz band

With Terahertz band (0.1-10 THz) technology, several nanoscale ad hoc applications could be developed, such as intrabody health monitoring, programmable material, etc. The fundamental element to ensure the functionality of these applications is the way to access the radio communication channel. The main challenge with nanocommunication is the need to efficiently share the terahertz radio spectrum to optimize data transmission in nanonetworks. In this context, Spread in Time On-Off Keying (TS-OOK) protocol was proposed as a channel access mechanism that uses Femtosecond-Long pulse-based OOK modulation. Furthermore, different new improvements of TS-OOK were introduced, such as RD-TSOOK and SRH-TSOOK approaches. In this paper, we review and compare the proposed OOK-based channel access techniques with our new approach called SDMA-TSOOK. The design of the proposed scheme takes into account the weaknesses of these mechanisms in terms of channel access balancing, co-channel collision, and networking capacity that pose a problem for concurrent channel access. We evaluate the performance of our proposed protocol using the BitSimulator. The obtained results showed that SDMA-TSOOK ensures 100% equitable access between nanodevices, as well as a better success rate with an insignificant number of collisions as compared to the published reference protocols. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.