Low-collision-rate Data Communication Mechanisms For Wireless Nanosensor Networks

The traditional wireless sensor networks(WSNs) have a lot of applications. However, due to the relatively large size of traditional wireless sensors, WSNs cannot be used in some situations like the intra-body monitoring. The wireless nanosensor networks(WNSNs) consisting of sensors with the size of several hundred nanometers are a new type of sensor networks, and they have some very important applications. As the nanosensors have very limited capability of computation, storage, energy provision, etc., the communication and networking protocols of the traditional WSNs are not suitable for WNSNs. So it is necessary to design communication and networking protocols specially for WNSNs.By considering the limited capability of nanosensors, this paper studies the design of low-complexity data communication mechanisms for WNSNs. The main contributions of this work are listed as follows.1. Variable-rate and low-collision data communication mechanism which does not perform node clock synchronization is proposed. This mechanism does not coordinate the transmission time of different nodes, different nodes have different transmission periods,and the transmission periods are optimized to minimize the collision frequency.2. Equal-rate and collision-free data communication mechanism is proposed. This mechanism is suitable to the scenario where the node clocks are synchronized. All nodes have the same transmission period. It achieves low collision probability through few transmissions of control frames between access nodes and relay node.These two data communication mechanisms for WNSNs fully take use of the feature of TS-OOK, and have low complexity and low collision probability.