An Energy-Efficient Data Collection Scheme in Body Area Nanonetworks

Wireless nanosensor networks (WNSNs) represent a class of emerging and important network model for perceiving information in the nanoscale. The extremely limited energy storage in nanosensors necessitates the design of energy-efficient protocols (e.g., data collection schemes) for such networks. This paper considers the design of energy-efficient data collection scheme in a WNSN operating in the human body, i.e., Body Area Nanonetwork (BANN). More specifically, this scheme involves a hierarchical (i.e., nanointerface-nanorouter-nanonode) collection structure with nanointerface receiving external requests and returning the requested data, nanorouter collecting data from nanonodes and nanonodes gathering data from human body. In the data collection process, each nanorouter first activates the nanonodes in a rectangle region centered at itself with length l and width W (i.e., wake-up region) and obtains the available energy level of each nanonode in this region. Each nanorouter then selects the nanonode with the largest available energy in the wake-up region to return the requested data. Finally, simulation results are provided to illustrate the performances of our scheme in terms of average available energy and path loss. These results show that better performances can be achieved when a smaller wake-up region is specified.