Thermal Conduction as a Wireless Communication Channel

While the heat equation has been extensively studied, heat conduction has not been studied as a means of communication until recently. Recent literature focusing on covert channels shows the feasibility of using thermal conduction to communicate information. Since heat conduction is modelled by a linear partial differential equation, it can be analyzed as a linear system with an input heat source and output temperature distribution. The magnitude of the thermal channel's frequency response is an exponentially decaying function of frequency. The thermal channel's capacity increases when the total power increases, similar to typical communication based on electromagnetic waves. Uniquely however, the thermal channel's effective bandwidth is constrained by the total power since a water-filling algorithm determines a cutoff frequency. Additionally, the quadratic nature of the heat equation presents a novel quadratic scaling of the channel capacity. Scaling space by a factor of 2 and time by 4 improves the channel capacity by a factor of 4. This implies that scaling space down from centimeter to micrometer domain improves the channel capacity by a factor of 108• The thermal channel presents various novel qualities and a possible exciting application for intra-chip communication.

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