Impact of Multiple Action Potentials on Communication Properties of Plants

This paper focuses on different properties of an electrochemical signal based model for inter-cellular communication in plants. The input signal in this communication system can be either composed of (a) a number of fast moving charged molecules or (b) randomly diffusing molecules, which are driven by an action potential (AP) signal. APs are usually generated by an external stimulus such as change in temperature or light. We use a model of AP generation in this paper from previous works. The three main contributions of this paper are: firstly we consider the impact of multiple AP signals on the mutual information of the system for multiple (varying) numbers of receiver cells in different configurations, second, we compare the impact of different propagation mechanisms (i.e. fast active movement and random diffusion of molecules) on the output molecules and mutual information of the system, and finally we study the impact of multiple APs on the information propagation speed of the system and compare it for the different receiver cell configurations.