ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the management of the communications resources and on the access to those resources: the medium access control (MAC). Nanocommunications imply the exchange of information at the nanoscale level, on the basis of any wired or wireless interconnection of nanomachines in a nanonetwork. Effective MAC strategies are well-known to networking and communication experts and are highly dependent on the properties of the communication channel and on the characteristics of communication in environment. In channel partitioning schemes, MAC is able to guarantee a constant performance level by partitioning the channel resources. A nanomachine is an integrated device, with sizes ranging from one to a few hundred nanometers, that is able to pursuit simple tasks such as sensing, plain computation, communication, and local actuation. Physical-layer-aware schemes are MAC protocols that are designed considering the specific features of the physical channel in nanocommunications.
