In-body nanonetwork routing based on MANET and THz

Devices at the nanoscale are envisioned to be used in medical applications to detect and treat diseases within a human body. However, due to its severe resource constraints, a nanoscale device might not execute complex tasks on its own. For this, we envision a medical nanonetwork, comprising an in-body network built of nanonodes and a Body Area Network (BAN) built of macroscale devices coordinating and controlling the nanonodes. Due to the characteristics of the in-body network and its nodes, conventional routing protocols for macroscale mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) are not directly applicable and novel approaches are needed. However, since a nanonetwork shares some characteristics of macroscale MANETs, we identified promising protocols and evaluated their suitability for nanonetworks using THz communication. We define requirements for their applicability and compare their performance.