Low-Weight Channel Coding for Interference Mitigation in Electromagnetic Nanonetworks in the Terahertz Band

Nanotechnology is providing the engineering community with a new set of tools to design and manufacture integrated devices just a few hundred nanometers in total size. Communication among these nano-devices will boost the range of applications of nanotechnology in several fields, ranging from biomedical research to military technology or environmental science. Within the different alternatives for communication in the nanoscale, recent developments in nanomaterials point to the Terahertz band (0.1-10 THz) as the frequency range of operation of future electromagnetic nano-transceivers. This frequency band can theoretically support very large bit-rates in the short range, i.e., for distances below one meter. Due to the limited capabilities of individual nano-devices, pulse-based communications have been proposed for electromagnetic nanonetworks in the Terahertz band. However, the expectedly very large number of nano-devices and the unfeasibility to coordinate them, can make interference a major impairment for the system. In this paper, low-weight channel coding is proposed as a novel mechanism to reduce interference in pulse-based nanonetworks. Rather than utilizing channel codes to detect and correct transmission errors, it is shown that by appropriately choosing the weight of a code, interference can be mitigated. The performance of the proposed scheme is analytically and numerically investigated both in terms of overall interference reduction and achievable information rate, by utilizing a new statistical interference model. The results show that this type of network-friendly channel coding schemes can be used to alleviate the interference problem in nanonetworks without compromising the individual user information rate.