ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates physical transmission rates and communication ranges reachable in human skin. The innovation process triggered by nanotechnology is rapidly concretizing the idea to deploy network architectures at the nanoscale, made up by integrated devices, with size ranging from one to a few hundreds of nanometers. The resulting channel model embraces absorption path loss, spreading path loss, molecular noise temperature, and noise power spectral density. In nanoscale communications, the information is generally encoded by using short pulses spread over a large bandwidth. The modeling of the pulsed electric field propagation in biological tissues is a subject of increasing research activities, since they are used in a number of applications in bioelectrics, a new interdisciplinary field combining knowledge of electromagnetic principles and theory, modeling and simulations, physics, material science, cell biology, and medicine. To deal with nanoscale communications and networking, it is important to know how the signal propagates across the medium.