Health Applications Based on Molecular Communications: A Brief Review

This work analyses significant cases in which applications of molecular communication systems to nano/bio-hybrid medical field represent an ideal solution for medical therapies (e.g., for the treatment of diseases such as cancer). A review of the literature reveals that biocompatibility jointly with nanocommunication can be exploited to provide effective treatment of diseases and reduce side effects considerably when compared to conventional therapy. Biocompatibility avoids the immune response rejecting drugs and does not stimulate nerves, whereas nanocommunication is a promising technology that allows accessing small and delicate body sites non-invasively. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

MAC Protocols for Wake-up Radio: Principles, Modeling and Performance Analysis

[EN] In wake-up radio (WuR) enabled wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a node triggers a data communication at any time instant by sending a wake-up call (WuC) in an on-demand manner. Such wake-up operations eliminate idle listening and overhearing burden for energy consumption in duty-cycled WSNs. Although WuR exhibits its superiority for light traffic, it is inefficient to handle high traffic load in a network. This paper makes an effort towards improving the performance of WuR under diverse load conditions with a twofold contribution. We first propose three protocols that support variable traffic loads by enabling respectively clear channel assessment (CCA), backoff plus CCA, and adaptive …

Priority-oriented multicast transmission schemes for heterogeneous traffic in WSNs

To ensure quality of service (QoS) for heterogeneous traffic in IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a challenging task since no traffic prioritization mechanism is defined in such WSNs. In this paper, we propose two priority-oriented multicast transmission schemes to provide QoS for heterogeneous traffic in WSNs. Contrary to the legacy CSMA/CA and FIFO principles, these schemes differentiate self-generated or received traffic and give priority to delay-sensitive traffic with respect to channel access and packet scheduling. Simulations are performed in order to assess the performance of these schemes in terms of end-to-end delay, energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, …

Reducing Overhearing Energy in Wake-Up Radio-Enabled WPANs: Scheme and Performance

Wake-up Radio (WuR)-enabled wireless personal area networks (WPANs) are more popular over conventional WPANs thanks to WuR's on-demand transmission feature and overwhelming energy consumption superiority. In a WuRenabled WPAN, overhearing occurs when a wake-up receiver decodes and validates the address of a wake-up call which is not intended to it. However, such overhearing consumes a portion of the required reception energy for unintended nodes. To diminish overhearing thus conserve total reception energy in a network, we propose a bit-by-bit address decoding (BBAD) scheme and compare it with another addressing scheme for WuR that uses a micro-controller unit to decode and match the whole …

Protocol Design and Performance Evaluation of Wake-up Radio enabled IoT Networks

Energy Efficient Consecutive Packet Transmissions in Receiver-Initiated Wake-Up Radio Enabled WSNs

In wake-up radio (WuR)-enabled wireless sensor networks, data communication among nodes is triggered in an on-demand manner, by either a sender or a receiver. For receiver-initiated WuR (RI-WuR), a receiving node wakes up sending nodes through a wake-up call. Correspondingly sending nodes transmit packets in a traditional way by competing with one another multiple times in a single operational cycle. In this paper, we propose a receiver-initiated consecutive packet transmission WuR (RI-CPT-WuR) medium access control (MAC) protocol, which eliminates multiple competitions to achieve higher energy efficiency. Furthermore, we develop two associated discrete time Markov chains (DTMCs) for evalua…

Enabling Retransmissions for Achieving Reliable Multicast Communications in WSNs

To ensure end-to-end reliable multicast or broadcast transmissions in IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless sensor networks WSNs) is a challenging task since no retransmission and acknowledgment mechanisms are defined in such WSNs. In this paper, we propose three retransmission enabled multicast transmission schemes in order to achieve reliable packet transmissions in such networks. Different from the legacy CSMA/CA principle, these schemes allow a sending or forwarding node to retransmit a packet if necessary and enable implicit or/and explicit acknowledgment for multicast services. Simulations are performed in order to assess the performance of these schemes in terms of number of retransmissions, …

Enabling early sleeping and early data transmission in wake-up radio-enabled IoT networks

Abstract Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the key enabling technologies for the Internet of things (IoT). In such networks, wake-up radio (WuR) is gaining its popularity thanks to its on-demand transmission feature and overwhelming energy consumption superiority. Despite this advantage, overhearing still occurs when a wake-up receiver decodes the address of a wake-up call (WuC) which is not intended to it, causing a certain amount of extra energy waste in the network. Moreover, long latency may occur due to WuC address decoding since WuCs are transmitted at a very low data rate. In this paper, we propose two schemes, i.e., early sleeping (ES) and early data transmission (EDT), to …

Does Wake-Up Radio Always Consume Lower Energy Than Duty-Cycled Protocols?

Many recent studies anticipate that wake-up radio (WuR) will replace traditional duty-cycled (DC) protocols given its overwhelming performance superiority on energy consumption. Meanwhile, the question on whether WuR performs always better than DC protocols has not been answered explicitly. In this paper, we investigate in-depth the energy consumption performance of WuR by considering various levels of traffic load in a wireless sensor network. By comparing SCM-WuR with both synchronous MAC (S-MAC) and asynchronous MAC (X-MAC), we ascertain that SCM-WuR does consume orders of magnitude lowerenergythanDCprotocolswhentrafficloadislow.Howe ver, our numerical results reveal at the same time that …

Lightweight Relay Selection in Multi-Hop Wake-Up Radio Enabled IoT Networks

Wake-up Radios (WuRs) are becoming more popular in Internet of Things (IoT) networks owing to their overwhelming advantages such as low latency, high energy saving, and on-demand communication. In a multi-hop WuR-IoT network, route establishment between source and destination prior to actual data communications consumes a significant portion of energy. To reduce energy consumption and protocol overhead for route establishment, we propose a lightweight relay (LR) selection scheme, referred to as LR-WuR, where a lookup table and acknowledgment are used for next hop relay selection. We develop an analytical model to evaluate the performance of LR-WuR. Extensive simulations are performed to val…

Collision Avoidance in Wake-Up Radio Enabled WSNs: Protocol and Performance Evaluation

In wake-up radio (WuR) enabled wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the envisaged application scenarios are primarily targeted at low traffic load conditions. When applying WuR to medium or heavy traffic load scenarios, however, collisions among wake-up calls (WuCs) may happen, resulting in a lower packet delivery ratio (PDR). In this paper, we propose a media access control protocol for WuR- enabled WSN that is capable of avoiding WuC collisions by activating a contention-based collision avoidance mechanism for WuC transmissions. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated by a Markov chain based mathematical model and is compared with a WuR protocol that performs only clear channel as…

Enabling Backoff for SCM Wake-Up Radio: Protocol and Modeling

In sub-carrier modulation (SCM) wake-up radio (WuR) enabled wireless sensor networks, a node can initiate data transmission at any instant of time. In this letter, we propose to activate a backoff procedure before sending wake-up calls (WuCs) in order to avoid potential collisions among WuCs. Consequently, no backoff is needed for the main radio after a WuC is received. A discrete-time Markov chain model is developed to evaluate the performance. Numerical results on network throughput, energy efficiency, average delay, and collision probability reveal the benefits of enabling backoff for SCM-WuRs, especially under heavy traffic loads or saturated traffic conditions.