Underwater acoustic channel has many drawbacks for wireless communication such as limited bandwidth, long propagation delay and severe Doppler spread. Furthermore, since underwater sensor nodes are typically battery powered, reducing power consumption and prolonging network lifetime become crucially important. Therefore, new design concepts and technical views are required.
A nanonetwork refers to the interconnection of nanoscale devices. These tiny devices can communicate with each other either though a wireless interface or a wired interface. Among the communication techniques molecular communication (MC) is preferred owing to its biocompatibility and its low energy requirements. Time synchronization is an essential element for any network, in general, to establish a successful communication such as implementing a time division multiple access. It becomes even more critical in a wireless network. Given the stochasticity and the large propagation delay in a molecular communication, it is pertinent to develop a time-synchronized MC-based nanonetwork. Current research is focused on the following topics: