Temperature-aware routing protocol for Intrabody Nanonetworks

Abstract
Intrabody Nanonetworks (IBN) are composed of nanosensors that have tremendous potential to
enable cellular level monitoring and precision in drug delivery and diagnosis. Nanoscale
communication using Electromagnetic (EM) waves propagation in the Terahertz (THz) band
suffers from molecular absorption noise that has been regarded as the leading cause of heat
generation along with antenna communication radiations. In the presented work, we propose a
novel Temperature–Aware routing protocol (TA-IBN) that explicitly addresses the thermal
related constraints of IBN. The proposed routing scheme aims at stabilizing the temperature in
the whole network by avoiding congestion and preventing temperature rise in the heated regions.
To avoid temperature rise, nanorouters estimate the temperature increase in their region and
excludes data collection from the hotspots areas. Moreover, during data collection, nanonodes’
selection is also optimized based on data freshness to enable reporting of a more accurate state of
physiological parameters with minimized antenna radiation exposure time. The temperature
increase analysis provided in this work can also be used for safety health assessment in medical
applications. We have evaluated the performance of TA-IBN by conducting extensive
simulations using the Nano-SIM tool. In addition, we compare TA-IBN with the flooding
scheme and Thermal-Aware Routing Algorithm (TARA) to gain further insights into our
proposed protocol TA-IBN. The results obtained confirm that our protocol ensures safer
intrabody routing and traffic distribution in different regions to normalize temperature rise, avoid
congestion, and reduce the communication delay.

Introduction
Population aging is affecting many sectors of society, including healthcare, infrastructure, social
protection, as well as family structures. The continuous growth in population aging requires the
proliferation of medical and healthcare resources. In this era, where increased healthcare service
requirements are pushing the current hospital system beyond its limits, the emergence of
nanotechnology has led to great advances in healthcare and medicines. Nanotechnology is the
crucial driving force behind the development of IBN that use nanosensors. Miniature size
nanosensors have excellent electronic properties that include low interaction with body tissues to
obtain fine-grained data from specific anatomical areas for monitoring and diagnosis purposes
(Yang and Webster, 2011).

In particular, electrochemical nanosensors achieve reliable solutions during significant trials of

glucose monitoring; for instance, clinically approved in-vivo glucose monitoring systems are
able to provide efficient diabetes care and management (Heo and Takeuchi, 2013). Moreover, the
involvement of optical nanosensors in advanced healthcare applications improves cancer biology
applications in terms of high specificity and early detection of small numbers of leukemia cells
(Shi et al., 2011). Similarly, the monitoring of cancer biomarkers and human chorionic
gonadotrophin are prominent contributions brought by magnetic resonance nanosensor (Agrawal
and Prajapati, 2012; Eckert et al., 2013). Table 1 further demonstrates how IBN, characterized by
nanosensors in various applications, are significantly improving the diagnosis and therapeutic
aspects of many nanomedicine applications. However, advances in nanomedicine applications
require addressing the implied limitation of the communication medium and implanted
nanosensors.

The realization of an efficient communication protocol for IBN can further broaden the
application range of IBN from intrabody health monitoring to drug delivery systems. However,
designing routing protocols for IBN is severely challenged due to nanosensors' energy, topology
unawareness, storage, and computational limitations. In addition to these constraints,
nanosens'ors' communications in the biological medium using EM waves also lead to several
fundamental challenges such as molecular absorption in the THz band (Akyildiz and Jornet,
2010; Akyildiz et al., 2014). Molecular absorption in the THz band is a key issue that affects the
properties of propagating waves leading to attenuation and increases the thermal noise
temperature. In this context, Jornet et al. (Jornet and Akyildiz, 2011) shed light on the issue of
thermal noise temperature caused by the molecular absorption in the THz band. Later, the
photothermal analysis presented in (Elayan et al., (2017a)) further explored the impact of heat
generation due to the propagation of EM waves in the biological cells. Existing studies (Elayan
et al., 2017a, 2017b; Kokkoniemi et al., 2016; Jornet and Akyildiz, 2011; Zhang et al., 2016)
have found that the molecular absorption thermal effects can increase the temperature of the
human body, which in turn, can damage the human body cells by causing multiple organ failures
and heat stroke.

Thermal-unawareness during routing decisions can also result in temperature rise. The
communication radiation from nanosensors produces heat and triggers molecular absorption
phenomena, which causes an increase in the temperature in the biological medium (Elayan et al.,
2017a). Therefore, the selection of the same optimum route (such as the shortest route for data
transmission or the unavailability of the next-hop can create a loop causing an increase in the
amount of communication radiations resulting in hotspot formation (Oey and Moh, 2013).
Thermal challenges have been extensively discussed and emphasized in several body area
networks routing protocols. However, these protocols are based on multi-hop forwarding that is
not suitable for nanosensors that are constrained in terms of transmission range, energy, storage,
and computation. The design requirements of IBNs routing also require a maximum of two-hop
data transmission between the sender and the receiver (Sarkar and Misra, 2016;
Balasubramaniam and Kangasharju, 2012). Fig. 1 highlights the main differences between
wireless body area networks and IBN based on various characteristics.

Existing work that addresses thermal challenges associated with packet routing is scarce and
needs more attention. To the best of our knowledge, existing protocols do not consider the
hazardous effects of antenna radiation and molecular absorption on biological cells. Research
efforts (Afsana et al., 2018; Piro et al., 2015; Xu et al., 2019; Fahim et al., 2019a, 2019b, 2020;
Javaid et al., 2019, 2020a, 2020b) have mainly focused on the energy consumption issue for
network layer protocols. In (Javaid et al., (2018)), we have investigated the thermal impact of
nanosensors density on temperature rise for the first time. Our results showed that increased data
communications require the frequent emissions of EM waves that lead to heat generation in
biological tissues and ultimately result in an increase in the temperature of the surrounding
biological cells. In this paper, we further explore the thermal challenges at the network layer and
we propose a novel solution for implementing temperature-aware routing in IBN.

The presented scheme monitors the increase in the temperature caused by molecular absorption
noise and antenna radiation exposure, and uses this information to control data traffic flow to
avoid hotspot formation. Moreover, instead of involving all nanonodes located in the proximity
for data reporting, we optimize nanonodes participation to reduce the antenna radiation exposure
time. We summarize the main contributions of this work as follows:

 1.

We model and analyze heat generation due to antenna radiation and molecular absorption
noise. The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) is used to estimate the temperature
rise caused by heat generation.

 2.

In TA-IBN, we consider the temperature rise estimation to avoid data traffic flow through
the hotspot regions. Furthermore, TA-IBN regulates nanonode selection for stabilizing
the temperature rise during the data reporting process.

 3.

We performed extensive simulations using the Nano-SIM tool to evaluate the

performance of TA-IBN. By comparing our proposed protocol with TARA and flooding
scheme, we investigated the impact of temperature-awareness during communication at
the network layer.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses IBN, including their
applications, communication approaches, existing body area thermal-aware routing protocols,
and some of their challenges. In Section 3, we describe the system architecture and our proposed
routing scheme. Section 4 provide performance evaluation results of TA-IBN. We make some
concluding remarks and highlight some future directions for our work in Section 5.

Section snippets
Background
This section discusses the potential and limitations of diverse nanoscale communication methods
in IBN. We also provide an in-depth discussion of molecular absorption phenomena to better
understand the thermal challenges related to EM waves propagation in the THz band.
Furthermore, we discuss practical implementation challenges of IBN.

Proposed TA-IBN for IBN

This section describes TA-IBN, including the architecture, total temperature rise estimation, and
network model.

Numerical results
In this section, we investigate the impact of different system parameters on heat formation. The
detailed simulations are implemented using the Nano-SIM tool to evaluate the equations
generated in 3.2. NANO-SIM is an open-source simulation platform devised for modeling EM-
based communication in nanonetworks (Piro et al., Camarda). In this paper, we investigate the
efficacy of our suggested temperature rise prevention scheme by comparing it with the flooding
scheme (Piro et al., Camarda) and

Conclusion
In IBN, nanoantennas radiate EM waves in the THz band for enabling nanoscale communication.
The propagation of EM waves in the THz band is affected by molecular absorption phenomena
that can increase the temperature of the biological medium. Therefore, the heat emitted from the
nanoantennas, along with the heat generated from the biological cells, is considered as the chief
contributor to the heat generation. Since the healthcare monitoring system requires significant
reporting of detected

Authorship statement
All persons who meet authorship criteria are listed as authors, and all authors certify that they
have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content, including
participation in the concept, design, analysis, writing, or revision of the manuscript.Shumaila
Javaid: Conception and design of study, Acquisition of data, Formal analysis and/or
Interpretation of data, Drafting the manuscript, Revising the manuscript critically for important
intellectual content,

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal
relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments which helped us
improve the content, organization, and presentation of this paper.

Shumaila Javaid did her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Shaanxi Normal University, China.
She is working as Assistant Professor at Ilma University Karachi, Pakistan and also associated
with Tongji University, Shanghai, China as a Post-doctoral researcher. She has received her MS
degree in Telecommunication and Networking from Bahria University, Pakistan in 2015. She
completed her BS degree from COMSATS University (CU), Pakistan in 2012. Her main
research interests include Wireless Sensor and

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