DRIH-MAC: A Distributed Receiver-Initiated Harvesting-Aware MAC for Nanonetworks

In this paper, we introduce DRIH-MAC, a distributed receiver-initiated medium access control protocol for communication among nanonodes in a wireless electromagnetic nanonetwork. DRIH-MAC is developed based on the following principles: 1) communication starts via the receiver with the goal of maximizing the energy utilization; 2) the distributed scheme for accessing the medium is designed based on graph coloring; and 3) communication scheduling works in coordination with the energy harvesting process. DRIH-MAC is based on a probabilistic scheme to create a scalable and light-weight solution, which minimizes collisions and maximizes the utilization of harvested energy, and can be used in a wide variety of applications. Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of DRIH- MAC in a sample medical monitoring application. In particular, DRIH-MAC can improve energy utilization by 50% as compared to a random MAC protocol. Furthermore, it can satisfy application requirements such as delay, even with low energy harvesting rates.