Reliability analysis of time-varying wireless nanoscale sensor networks

Advances in nanotechnology is paving the way for wireless nanoscale sensor networks (WNSNs), promising radically new applications in medical, biological, and chemical fields. The small nanomaterial-based antennas communicate in the terahertz band, which coincide with the natural resonance frequencies of many molecule species causing severe molecular absorption and noise. The problem is particularly more complicated when the channel condition (composition, pressure and temperature) changes over time, causing time-varying absorption. This paper aims to characterise the time-varying property of terahertz communication over a channel whose condition varies over time. Using existing propagation models for WNSNs, we then investigate the reliability of communication over composition varying channels as a major class of time-varying WNSNs. We use WNSN for chemical reactor monitoring and health monitoring as two case studies where channel compositions vary over time. Our simulation results show that for a given transmitted power, the Signal-To-Noise (SNR) and Bit Error Rate (BER) vary over time in a given distance from the transmitter and that is highly sensitive to the composition of the channel.