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"The future is created by you, but not for you."
(Strugatsky brothers "Ugly Swans")
Until recently, the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT - Internet of Things) seemed strange to many, and today the best representatives of civilization have already started talking about the Internet on the most recent (IoNT - Internet of NanoThings). In fact, if you can turn any “thing” from a refrigerator to a person into a network element, then why not move deeper into the refrigerator or even a person? And what is there, for example, with the products? - Nothing rotten? Like their more “large” comrades, nanosites are combined into nanosets, among which not only electromagnetic, but also molecular.
Two Internet
There is such a sign - the more berries on mountain ash, the harsher the winter. A couple of years ago in our garden there was no berries at all in the mountain ash, and, for example, the usual onion was almost completely without a peel (another folk omen). And there was practically no winter. It would seem such a simple question - how do the mountain ash and the onions know this? If you reflect on it, it turns out that the question is not so simple. It is not excluded that it is possible to uncover the rowan-onion riddle by penetrating into these plants at the nano level. And it may very soon become a reality.
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For a long time, the world has been talking about IoT, and it is logical that IoNT appeared when individual “things” began to include inexpensive microsensors, microprocessors together, miniature antennas and batteries. The emergence and development of IoNT is closely related to the progress of nanotechnology, which is now often embedded in various industrial verticals, including defense, aerospace, health care, biomedical, industrial production, and further down to entertainment and retail. Making the devices made using these technologies to exchange information is the cherished dream of many professionals who want to at least know about the course of various technological processes in any industry or about all changes in the human body. The development of nanomachines with communication capabilities and their integration with micro and macro devices gives rise to a new paradigm of the Internet before our eyes, which can affect practically all spheres of life from healthcare to national security. And then even Big Brother, obviously, will receive at least the help of Little Brother.
Actually, nanotechnology is a new industry that develops extremely small devices that can perform simple actions. Being simple and making only primitive operations, nanomachines separately are not able to work with complex tasks. Anyway, bye. To enable work with more complex applications, such as the delivery of drugs to the desired organ in the human body, the ability to exchange information and commands between network objects and the controller is required, which leads to the need to create a concept of nano-networks. In the same concept, it is imperative to foresee the connection between IoNT and IoT, and the creation of such interfaces, which are necessary, for example, when moving from a human body to a communication network familiar to us, will be a separate interesting task.
In general, IoNT is a set of wirelessly connected nanodevices that have access to a communication network and, above all, to the Internet. Otherwise, a multitude of nanoscale communication networks may be connected to the Internet in the foreseeable future, expanding the world of IoT to IoNT. Actually, IoNT is a further local development of IoT, where it is necessary or where it is possible. And both inside living and non-living objects, and without.
It is not difficult to assume that such technological capabilities will inevitably increase. It is not excluded that someday this local development will become global, and, for example, some kind of intellectual dust will fly across the seas and oceans over countries and continents, and nano-sensors will be present in almost every solid, liquid and friable product in order to inform in time whether the formulation, climate, viscosity and other properties are not violated, not excluding the information about what any Agent 007 is currently engaged in, on whose lapel there is a high-tech speck. And, for example, seemingly ordinary spirits, thanks to intelligent nano-additives, will themselves signal in time about compliance with a given smell, and drugs - about their real effects on the body.
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Studies of promising technologies for telecommunications have already turned, for example, to the use of pheromone substances, with the help of which flora and fauna representatives have long learned to exchange information. How could this look like in some 8G mobile communication, which is even more sensitive to the nuances of the personal data of the customer base? - Well, for example, like this: the customer satisfaction monitoring service center noted a sharp change in the smell coming from the subscriber located at a particular point, and the built-in artificial intelligence, regarding it as a fright, caused emergency services to that point. Who knows if nanodevices will be created over time in the form of nanopoly that imitate pheromones?
Published in a few years ago by EMC, the Digital Universe study states that the volume of the digital universe doubles every 2 years. And if, according to forecasts, IoT is billions of everyday objects and devices that have unique identifiers and can automatically register, collect and receive data, then IoNT is already at least trillions of nanodevices.
Changes in demand patterns and innovative applications are expected to create a significant increase in demand in the market over the next few years. Especially you should expect this where you can create exciting business opportunities in this market. As expected, the IoNT market will grow to $ 10 billion by 2020, with an estimated cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.81%. According to experts, the development of the IoNT market is due to three main drivers: the continuation of ubiquitous network connectivity, government incentives, and the known advantages of connected devices. However, ensuring privacy and security, as well as the required amount of investment in nanotechnology, is expected to be the strongest deterrents to the development of the global IoNT market. However, despite these limitations, the demand from various industrial verticals is already growing in the interests of expanding opportunities for the global market.
One of the largest players on the IoNT market is now Intel Corporation, Cisco Systems Inc., Qualcomm Incorporated, Juniper Networks and IBM Corporation in the USA, Schneider Electric in France, SAP SE and Siemens AG in Germany, etc.
Past iont
As you might guess, the Internet has never had a new past in the modern sense. As the saying goes, there was no Internet, there wasn’t any more - there was no problem either. However, let's return to this later, but for now let's deal with the current challenges of progressive humanity.
Present IoNT
It is at least understandable to modern man for what it is possible to use IoNT and what benefits this could bring. But so far everything is at the stage of generation, development of the concept and choice of technologies. Fortunately, some advanced companies have futurologists and other marketing dreamers. However, experts are more interested in how it will be arranged and how it will work. And while humanity has not invented anything else, there surely must be everything, “like adults”, that is, the usual components performed by “nano”: cameras, telephones, scalar sensors, processors, memory cards, power supplies, antennas and transceivers. Today, many developers are working hard on this nano-mosaic to make it work in the image and likeness of the macrocosm, and only then it will somehow change over time. It all depends on the development of new technologies and their penetration into our lives, as well as on the interest of end users in them. Depending on the number of items and their type, various technologies can be used to collect, process and exchange information within the framework of seamless data transfer between devices.
Nano-objects must interact in any place, at any time, and they themselves may well be heterogeneous, working with both IoT and IoNT. As in the story of the Internet of Things, each element of IoNT in the value chain must go through, perhaps, revolutionary changes and optimization of its functionality. The factors stimulating the IoNT market, given the attendant difficulties, often converge to government support, but the emerging increase in connectivity is also beneficial for market and industry leaders.
The development of nanotechnology goes in parallel with the advent of new developments on the Internet and sensor networks. In recent years, the direction of nanocommunications has emerged, the purpose of which is to create new paradigms of interaction between nanodevices to improve their capabilities and methods of application. However, nanodevices can communicate not only in peer-to-peer mode. Embedding nanosensors in various objects and devices surrounding users can lead to the addition of a new dimension to the IoT concept by adding IoNT. Such miniature sensors connected by a nano-network can supply fine-structured data from inside objects or hard-to-reach areas. For example, wearable nanosensors can provide for the collection and transmission of electrocardiographic and other vital signals. Microsensors installed in the environment can collect information about pathogens and allergens present in a particular physical location. If you combine these two data sources based on IoNT, you can get an accurate diagnosis and monitor the patient's condition.
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However, in the face of nanotechnology, the engineering community received a new set of tools for developing nanoscale components with unprecedented functionality. Well, the integration of several nanocomponents into a single organism with the help of nanowires will contribute to the development of more and more new nanomachines, which will create many applications in the biomedical, environmental, industrial and military fields. However, today it is not yet completely clear, not only how will nanomachines communicate with each other, but also how they will exchange information with larger “things”. In response to this challenge in recent years in the field of nanotechnology, a new direction has emerged - nanoconnection or communication between nanodevices: nanocircuits, nanobots, nano-drones, nanomachines, etc.
Actually, many devices are becoming increasingly miniature and soon physical objects connected to the Internet will not be easy to see with the naked eye; computers the size of a grain of salt will include a solar cell, a thin-film battery, RAM, a pressure sensor, a wireless radio and an antenna; grain-sized video cameras are already working with the highest resolution today; sensors the size of a speck of dust (0.05x0.005 mm) can measure temperature and pressure, recognize movement and transmit the received data.
In general, sometime with the advent of real success IoNT, life will be better, life will be more fun.
How to do it?
It should be noted that research in this area is so important that it even entered into the list of priority works of the famous American agency of advanced defense research projects DARPA. Well, you can implement all of the above in various ways.
The relationship between networks and the Internet requires the emergence of new technological solutions for creating interfaces between nano-and macro networks, the development of new communication methods, methods for processing and storing a huge amount of data circulating in networks, new data service models from nano-sources of information. The process of information transfer at the nanoscale level can be based on various physical principles: molecular, that is, what is happening in the biological environment, photonic, acoustic and, of course, electromagnetic. The latter includes various types of communication: femtocells, ZigBee, ultra-wideband signals, Li-Fi, etc. The connection itself can be carried out both between devices located on the same chip, and between such crystals, as well as for access to the micro level.
Here, for example, flashing lights that usually annoy us, it turns out can be useful. Visible Light Communication (VLC) or Li-Fi, as it is also called, uses light pulses for wireless transmission of information. LED-based Li-Fi has achieved surprisingly high data transfer rates in the laboratory and can already compete with regular Wi-Fi. By the way, back in 2005, neurons that react to light of a certain color were created using genetic engineering methods, the corresponding technology was called optogenetics. Light rays of various colors allow you to turn specific neurons on and off in order to, for example, treat chronic pain or soothe the patient. An important factor in such light therapy is time, since the same signal sent a few milliseconds sooner or later may have the opposite meaning for the patient's brain.
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However, for telecommunications operators, the principles of electromagnetic coupling are much more familiar and understandable much lower in range. They are defined as the transmission and reception of electromagnetic radiation from various components based on new nanomaterials. One of today's implementations of nanocommunication is the paradigm of developing wireless networks on a chip (Wireless Network on Chip, WiNoC), including for transferring data between nanoshemes located on a common substrate. Of course, this is not yet IoNT, but something very close in technology, which also has its own small history. At one time, work on the design methodology for multi-core chips led to the idea of creating a network-on-chip (Network on Chip, NoC) and became an important direction for the development of systems on a chip (System on chip, SoC). And recently, the eyes of experts turned to WiNoC, which is applicable to nanotechnology and to create IoNT.
In particular, the problem of providing electrical contact of a nanoelectronic device or circuit and any macro-element without significant losses in the current density achievable at the nano level is currently topical. It turned out that the commonly used method of lithographic manufacturing of contact pads is not effective for large-scale parallel signal processing, which requires the combination of multiple nanosystems on a single chip. It is this problem that is solved with the help of wireless communication, when using the effects of capacitive coupling between miniature pads or inductive coupling between spiral inductors.
One of the most common implementations of WiNoC provides for the presence of both wireless and traditional wired signal transmission lines in a single chip. In this case, the entire system on a chip is conventionally divided into subnets from groups of cores, within which communication is carried out by wire lines.
Each such subnet is equipped with a miniature base station (BS) that provides for the transmission and reception of data packets over the radio channels from other subnets. All cores in the subnet are connected to their BS via wired links. The transfer of a data packet between the cores of different subnets is carried out first locally to the corresponding BS, then over the air to the BS of the subgroup in which the addressee is located and then via the wired line to the destination. The association of the BS in the radio network can be performed on the topology of the star, loop, mesh network, etc., i.e. just as it is usually done at the macro level. In more complex solutions, areas of wired signal transmission may be completely absent, although the hybrid implementation described above is technologically simpler.
Recent advances in molecular physics and, in particular, new properties of carbon applicable in the interests of electronics, opened the door to a new generation of electronic nano-components like nano-accumulators, nano-memory, logic circuitry at the nano-level and nano-antenna. By the way, the miniaturization of the classical antenna (and not only the antenna) in accordance with the requirements for the size of nanomachines involves the use of very high radio frequencies, which, it seems, could jeopardize the feasibility of such networks.
Currently, research in nanotelecommunications is focused on increasing the bandwidth of a communication channel when using ultra-wideband signals occupying the entire terahertz frequency range (terahertz = 1012 Hz). Connections between nanomachines with speeds of several terabits per second are quite possible, but only at distances much less than 1 meter. True, in many promising applications, sometimes even larger ones are unnecessary. It is more important to find a way to increase the radius of action of an individual communication node. The channel capacity in the terahertz range is already being investigated to determine its potential. From the point of view of ensuring communication, the unique properties observed in new nanomaterials will set the requirements for specific radio frequency bands, delays and the magnitude of the radiated power. All these tasks imply fundamental changes in the current state of affairs in the field of analytical models of channels, network architectures and communication protocols, being a serious source for the discovery of new scientific research.
A unique feature of the terahertz frequency range is the molecular absorption of electromagnetic radiation - an effect that occurs when a signal is transmitted at frequencies close to and equal to the resonant frequencies of molecules that absorb some of the signal energy and create noise at the same frequencies due to the internal kinetic energy of molecules. The ability to absorb energy by a molecule is determined by physical properties: molecular bonds, spatial orientation, etc. Among all the components of the Earth’s atmosphere, the largest contribution is made by the absorption of water vapor by molecules. Another important problem is the rather strong attenuation of the microwave signal as it propagates in free space in all directions. However, there is a way to avoid serious signal distortion using the so-called transparency windows, where the losses due to absorption at small and medium distances are negligibly small.
Today, new communication mechanisms for electromagnetic nano-networks are being developed, including modulation based on the transmission of femtosecond pulses. By the way, nano-antennas allow using not only radio frequency, but also optical range in wireless networks on a chip. Future radio frequency electronic nano-modules can use the following conductive nanomaterials: silver nanoparticles, graphite nanotubes, or a graphene coating.
In particular, plasma nanoantennas can be implemented on the basis of graphene. Not so long ago, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated with the help of computer modeling the fundamental possibility of creating nanoantennas from graphene, by means of which hundreds and thousands of mechanisms or devices at the nano and micro levels can be combined into a single network using wireless communication. First, why graphene? Because unlike traditional metals, such as copper or silver, graphene can work as an antenna with a much smaller amount of energy input. This effect is achieved through the use of surface electron waves that occur on the surface of graphene under certain conditions, when electrons create oscillations of the electric field, which, in turn, become the source of an electromagnetic wave propagating exclusively along the surface of graphene. This phenomenon is known as the surface plasmon-polariton wave (surface plasmon polariton, SPP), which will allow graphene nano-antennas to operate in the lower region of the terahertz range of 0.1 ... 10 THz. By the way, a similar effect in metals (for example, gold) occurs at much higher frequencies. Thanks to the new graphene nano-antenna, it is possible to reduce by two orders of magnitude the frequency of radio transmitters and reduce the amount of energy required for its operation by four orders of magnitude. Theoretically, the terahertz range, in which graphene nano-antennas work effectively, can provide data transmission in wireless networks with a speed that is two orders of magnitude faster than the existing wireless technologies.
In turn, the piezoelectric properties of zinc oxide nanowires are already used to create nanogenerators capable of generating electricity and producing electromagnetic waves in a wide frequency range, including the one where graphene nano-antennas show maximum efficiency. In combination with graphene nanoantennas, such nanogenerators are a complete transmitting wireless device that requires a very small amount of energy received from the movement energy of a nano- or micromechanism. In addition, devices are being created, say sensors, that feed on metabolic processes occurring in cells.
By the way, while researchers dream of organizing communication between nanomachines, the use of graphene nano-antennas in macroscale networks looks much more attractive. Not so long ago, representatives from Ericsson Research presented a prototype of a miniature semiconductor transceiver that can transmit data at speeds up to 40 Gbit / s at frequencies of 141.5-1488 GHz, which is about 40 times faster than LTE technologies can provide.
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A significant technological breakthrough that allowed the transition from the theory of wireless networks on a chip to their practical implementation was the emergence of complex nanoantennas in the form of graphene nanotubes several years ago, which have different lengths and, consequently, a resonant frequency for frequency multiplexing signals. Such a solution allows to ensure the output of networks on the chip to the external macro level. Moreover, on similar principles it is possible to organize the power supply of nanodevices. (), . , - - . , .
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