Relaying in diffusion-based molecular communication

This paper is eligible for the student paper award. Molecular communication between biological entities is a new paradigm in communications. Recently, we studied molecular communication between two nodes formed from synthetic bacteria. Due to high randomness in behavior of bacteria, we used a population of them in each node. The reliability of such communication systems depends on both the maximum concentration of molecules that a transmitter node is able to produce at the receiver node as well as the number of bacteria in each nodes. This maximum concentration of molecules falls with distance which makes the communication to the far nodes nearly impossible. In order to alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose to use a molecular relaying node. The relay node can resend the message either by the different or the same type of molecules as the original signal from the transmitter. We study two scenarios of relaying. In the first scenario, the relay node simply senses the received concentration and forwards it to the receiver. We show that this sense and forward scenario, depending on the type of molecules used for relaying, results in either increasing the range of concentration of molecules at the receiver or increasing the effective number of bacteria in the receiver node. For both cases of sense and forward relaying, we obtain the resulting improvement in channel capacity. We conclude that multi-type molecular relaying outperforms the single-type relaying. In the second scenario, we study the decode and forward relaying for the M-ary signaling scheme. We show that this relaying strategy increases the reliability of M-ary communication significantly.

[1]  Mohsen Sardari,et al.  Capacity of discrete molecular diffusion channels , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Proceedings.

[2]  I. Mian,et al.  Communication theory and multicellular biology. , 2011, Integrative biology : quantitative biosciences from nano to macro.

[3]  H. Berg.  Random Walks in Biology , 2018 .

[4]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  Monaco: fundamentals of molecular nano-communication networks , 2012, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[5]  Burkhard A. Hense,et al.  Sensitivity of the quorum sensing system is achieved by low pass filtering , 2008, Biosyst..

[6]  Raviraj S. Adve,et al.  Molecular Communication in Fluid Media: The Additive Inverse Gaussian Noise Channel , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[7]  Mohsen Sardari,et al.  Data gathering in networks of bacteria colonies: Collective sensing and relaying using molecular communication , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM Workshops.

[8]  Mohsen Sardari,et al.  Collective sensing-capacity of bacteria populations , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Proceedings.

[9]  B. Bassler.  How bacteria talk to each other: regulation of gene expression by quorum sensing. , 1999, Current opinion in microbiology.

[10]  Kwang-Cheng Chen,et al.  A new frontier of wireless communication theory: diffusion-based molecular communications , 2012, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[11]  Özgür B. Akan,et al.  On Molecular Multiple-Access, Broadcast, and Relay Channels in Nanonetworks , 2008, BIONETICS.

[12]  Mohsen Sardari,et al.  Capacity of diffusion-based molecular communication with ligand receptors , 2011, 2011 IEEE Information Theory Workshop.

[13]  Mohsen Sardari,et al.  Molecular communication between two populations of bacteria , 2012, 2012 IEEE Information Theory Workshop.

[14]  Christopher Rose,et al.  Wireless signaling with identical quanta , 2012, 2012 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC).

[15]  Tadashi Nakano,et al.  Repeater design and modeling for molecular communication networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS).