Distance Effect of Molecular Harvesting over Signal Reception and Harvesting Performance in DIRECT

Since the introduction of the nanonetworks, molecular communication has become a popular research area in computer science. Although there are several methods proposed to implement molecular communication, none of them treats resources as discrete entities. We define resources as the discrete physical particles taking part in the communication tasks in a nanonetwork, such as information encoding. DIRECT is a novel networking scheme particularly aimed to model the re-use of resources in a confined operating environment. In DIRECT, resources do not disperse, they do not attenuate over time and they are considered 100% reusable, if properly harvested. In this paper, the impact of harvester location over the signal reception and the harvesting performance of the nodes are investigated. The main outcome of the paper is that, in terms of signal reception, the optimum location for the harvester is the midpoint between the sender and receiver nodes, whereas the harvesting performance increases as the harvester approaches the sender node.