2.3.

1 Nanocommunication mechanisms

Nanotechnology is a new and very promising area of research which will allow several new
applications to be created in different fields, such as, biological, medical, environmental, military,
agricultural, industrial and consumer goods. This paper focuses specifically on nanocommunications,
which will allow interconnected devices, at the nano-scale, to achieve collaborative tasks, greatly
changing the paradigm in the fields described. Molecular communication is a new communication
paradigm which allows nanomachines to exchange information using molecules as carrier. This is the
most promising nanocommunication method within nanonetworks, since it can use bio-inspired
techniques, inherit from studied biological systems, which makes the connection of biologic and
man-made systems a easier process. At this point, the biggest challenges in these type of
nanocommunication are to establish feasible and reliable techniques that will allow information to
be encoded, and mechanisms that ensure a molecular communication between different nodes. This
paper focus on creating concepts and techniques to tackle these challenges, and establishing new
foundations on which future work can be developed. The created concepts and techniques are then
applied in an envisioned medical application, which is based on a molecular nanonetwork deployed
inside the Human body. The goal of this medical application is to automatously monitor endocrine
diseases using the benefits of nanonetworks, which in turn connects with the internet, thus creating
a Internet of NanoThings system. The concepts and techniques developed are evaluated by
performing several simulations and comparing with other researches, and the results and discussions
are presented on the later sections of this paper.

2.3.2 Transmission process in nanoscale

The recent progress in high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) has given rise to
the possibility of in situ observations of nanostructure transformations and chemical reactions
induced by electron irradiation. In this article we briefly summarise experimental observations and
discuss in detail atomistic modelling of irradiation-induced processes in HRTEM, as well as
mechanisms of such processes recognised due to modelling. Accurate molecular dynamics (MD)
techniques based on first principles or tight-binding models are employed in the analysis of single
irradiation-induced events, and classical MD simulations are combined with a kinetic Monte Carlo
algorithm to simulate continuous irradiation of nanomaterials. It has been shown that sulphur-
terminated graphene nanoribbons are formed inside carbon nanotubes as a result of an irradiation-
selective chemical reaction. The process of fullerene formation in HRTEM during continuous electron
irradiation of a small graphene flake has been simulated, and mechanisms driving this transformation
analysed.

2.3.3 Spread Spectrum

We present now the block diagram of a typical communication system with the
difference that the modulator/demodulator has as input the spreading generator. This
piece will be explored in following sections.

Figure 2: Block diagram of the spread spectrum communication system

There are two predominant techniques to spread the spectrum:

1) Frequency hoping (FH), which makes the narrow band signal jump in random narrow
bands within a larger bandwidth.
2) Direct sequence (DS) which introduces rapid phase transition to the data to make it
larger in bandwidth.

We will focus on Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum technique since it is the mostly used
in the industry (CDMA, UMTS, 802.11, GPS).

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Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum

(DSSS)

Direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) introduces rapid phase transition to the data
making it larger in bandwidth. As the period T of a signal gets shorter in time (or
rate R  increases), the bandwidth B of the signal increases: R = 1/T = 2B (Nyquist Rate)

The following figures explain it:

Figure 3: Rate and period are related to bandwidth by  when pulse
shaping is used. 

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Spreading and Despreading

The rapid phase transition (chip rate  ) signal has a larger bandwidth given that the rate
is greater  (without changing the power of the original signal) and behaves similar to
noise in such a way that their spectrums are similar for bandwidth in scope. In fact, the
power density amplitude of the spread spectrum output signal is similar to the noise
floor. The signal is “hidden” under the noise.

To get the signal back, the exact same high bandwidth signal is needed. This is like a key,
only the demodulator that “knows” such a key will be able to demodulate and get the
message back. This “key” is in fact a pseudo random sequence (rapid phase transition)
also known as pseudo noise (PN). These sequences are generated by m-sequences.

m-Sequences
These codes (DSSS codes) will all be treated as pseudonoise (PN) sequences because
resembles random sequences of bits with a flat noiselike spectrum.

This sequence appears to have random pattern but in fact can be recreated by using the
shift register structure in Figure 4 with M=4, polynomial   and initial state ‘1 1 0
0’.

Figure 4: Shift register structure for m-sequence

Where ‘ ’ represent modulo 2 addition.

Using this scheme, the initial state is only needed to generate exactly the same sequence
of length   (the only forbidden state is all zeros since the register will lock in this
state).

Take for example:

The final sequence will look like this,

1 1 -1 -1 -1 1 -1 -1 1 1 -1 1 -1 1 1

After the fifteenth shift, the values on the registers will be again the starting seed.

Properties of m-Sequences
Period: 
After this number of ‘1’ and ‘-1’ the sequence will start to repeat since the starting
symbols will be the same.
Autocorrelation:

The formal definition of discrete autocorrelation is:

Consider the previous sequence

1 1 -1 -1 -1 1 -1 -1 1 1

If we perform the following operation:

= 15 which is multiply each value by itself and add them all ( ).

Now take  ,

Performing the same operation:

= -1 = 

This is the autocorrelation for each shift point. If we take them all and plot them so that
there are 15 points before 0 and 15 after:
a)
b)

Figure 5: Correlation of a) example sequence and b) other sequence with

polynomial    created with LabVIEW and MathScript

As seen, only if the end user having the exact sequence is able to demodulate the
message when the sequence is synchronized (peak at correlation = 1). Other users will
have very little amplitude of the original signal. This is the principle of Code Division
Multiple Access (CDMA) cellular systems, in other words, share the same frequency and
time with multiple users with different codes.

2.3.4 Transmission power

Energy consumption is an important consideration in sensor networks for sensing, computation, and
communication. For any sensor network, either ad hoc or distributed, controlled or self-organized,
energy management is crucial since the lifetime of a sensor node depends exclusively on its limited
battery capacity (except for physical damage and system failures), hence, it is extremely important to
adopt energy-efficient strategies for data gathering as well as information processing within the
network. Our focus here is to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks for data
communication. In this paper we have proposed an algorithm which will ensure that data is
transmitted to the Fusion Node in all scenarios considering the efficient energy consumption factor
and also the propagation delay
2.4 WNSN for embedded system design

Radio Frequency (RF)/Wireless NoC, 3D NoC, photonic NoC have been introduced to alleviate these
problems by, for example, replacing some of the multi-hop wire links with high-bandwidth single-hop
long-range wireless channels [50]. Several studies have shown that wireless NoCs are promising
alternatives to conventional OCIs (On-chip Interconnects), which allow reducing latency and energy
dissipation in communication between remote nodes. Other studies show that nanophotonic
communication are expected to reach levels of performance-per-watt scaling by supporting energy-
efficient high-bandwidth data transfers among processing cores. In [51], authors have stated clearly
that 3DNoC, nanophotonic communication and on-chip wireless links are all promising alternatives to
traditional interconnects for building onchip interconnects of future multi-core systems-on-chip

2.5 Simulation tools for nanonetworks

. Nano-Sim is an open source simulator, which is implemented in the Network Simulator 3 (NS3). NS3
is a discrete-event network simulator, targeted primarily for research and educational use. It is free
software, licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license, and is publicly available for research, development,
and use [54]. The main features covered by the developed NanoSim tool are (Figure 2.11):

 The implementation of different devices forming a WNSN;  A physical interface based on the Time
Spread On-Off Keying (TS-OOK) modulation scheme;  A simple Media Access Control (MAC)
protocol;  A routing module based on the flooding strategy;  A generic unit for generating and
processing messages

investigating WNSN using NanoSim we have highlighted several issues that need to be considered:

 Designing nanodevice  Architecture of WNSN  Communication methods in terahertz band