Diffusion-based Physical Channel Identification for Molecular Nanonetworks

Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular/atomic level. Nanomachines are expected to be very simple devices, but nanonetworks, the association of nanomachines, are expected to increase their capabilities, allowing them to share information in order to perform more complex tasks and increase their range of operation. How nanomachines will communicate is currently under research. This growing research field has attracted the interest of researchers from several domains, from information and communication technologies, to nanotech-nology or biotechnology and several communication alternatives have been recently proposed. Molecular communication (MC), based on the exchange of information by releas-ing/absorbing molecules, is a novel communication paradigm to interconnect nanoma-chines that seems well-suited to the nano-scale, specially, when intra-body scenarios for medical applications are envisaged. MC spans different bio-inspired distance-based techniques for the transportation of molecules. Amongst these, diffusion-based MC, proposed for covering short distances (nm−µm), is one of the techniques tha