Section: New Results

New and other communication paradigms

Participants : Nathalie Mitton, Valeria Loscri.

Interconnection and self-organized systems are normally populated with heterogeneous and different devices. The differences range from computational capabilities, storage size, etc. Instead of considering the heterogeneity as a limitation, it is possible to "turn it" as a primitive control of the system, in order to realize more robust and more resilient communication systems.

Based on those considerations, we have studied and analyzed the specific features of devices belonging to the category of micro-nano nodes that are however, required to interact with up-sized devices.

In order to improve the understanding of the behavior of micro/nano-sized devices, we have considered fundamental the analysis in specific applications and environment, where this kind of devices can be largely exploited, such as on/in-body networks applications.

Indeed, we retain that bio-medical applications can be advantaged by an effective and efficient communication and cooperation of devices deployed both on top of the body and inside it. Even if the research community recognizes a great importance to the study of interaction between the Human Immune System (HIS) and nano devices, this branch of research is in its infancy due to the major issue to model the HIS. A theoretical derivation of HIS and its interaction with a nanoparticulate system have been proposed in [15]. Some experimental results have been derived in [16], where specific parameters, e.g. temperature variations, Ph, etc. have been considered to establish the biocpmpatibility of TiO2 particles with human tissues.

A step ahead in this direction has consisted in the consideration of alternative particles as potential information carriers always in the context of biological environments. In [40] we have studied phonons as information carriers, we have derived a channel modeling and evaluated the theoretical capacity. The main reasons for taking into consideration this type of nanoparticles are twofold. Firstly, phonons represent something that is naturally generated in a biological context with the application of a tolerable electromagnetic field and secondly they represent a straightforward way to implement nanomachines, since their native size.