TY - JOUR
T1 - Chemical Reactions-Based Microfluidic Transmitter and Receiver Design for Molecular Communication
AU - Bi, Dadi
AU - Deng, Yansha
AU - Pierobon, Massimiliano
AU - Nallanathan, Arumugam
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. CCF-1816969.
Funding Information:
Manuscript received August 8, 2019; revised January 3, 2020, March 15, 2020, and May 2, 2020; accepted May 2, 2020. Date of publication May 11, 2020; date of current version September 16, 2020. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. CCF-1816969. This article was presented in part at the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, Singapore, December 2017. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was M. Nasiri-Kenari. (Corresponding author: Yansha Deng.) Dadi Bi and Yansha Deng are with the Department of Engineering, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, U.K. (e-mail: dadi.bi@kcl.ac.uk; yansha.deng@kcl.ac.uk).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1972-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2020/9
Y1 - 2020/9
N2 - The design of communication systems capable of processing and exchanging information through molecules and chemical processes is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field, which holds the promise to revolutionize how we realize computing and communication devices. While molecular communication (MC) theory has had major developments in recent years, more practical aspects in designing components capable of MC functionalities remain less explored. This paper designs chemical reactions-based microfluidic devices to realize binary concentration shift keying (BCSK) modulation and demodulation functionalities. Considering existing MC literature on information transmission via molecular pulse modulation, we propose a microfluidic MC transmitter design, which is capable of generating continuously predefined pulse-shaped molecular concentrations upon rectangular triggering signals to achieve the modulation function. We further design a microfluidic MC receiver capable of demodulating a received signal to a rectangular output signal using a thresholding reaction and an amplifying reaction. Our chemical reactions-based microfluidic molecular communication system is reproducible and its parameters can be optimized. More importantly, it overcomes the slow-speed, unreliability, and non-scalability of biological processes in cells. To reveal design insights, we also derive the theoretical signal responses for our designed microfluidic transmitter and receiver, which further facilitate the transmitter design optimization. Our theoretical results are validated via simulations performed through the COMSOL Multiphysics finite element solver. We demonstrate the predefined nature of the generated pulse and the demodulated rectangular signal together with their dependence on design parameters.
AB - The design of communication systems capable of processing and exchanging information through molecules and chemical processes is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field, which holds the promise to revolutionize how we realize computing and communication devices. While molecular communication (MC) theory has had major developments in recent years, more practical aspects in designing components capable of MC functionalities remain less explored. This paper designs chemical reactions-based microfluidic devices to realize binary concentration shift keying (BCSK) modulation and demodulation functionalities. Considering existing MC literature on information transmission via molecular pulse modulation, we propose a microfluidic MC transmitter design, which is capable of generating continuously predefined pulse-shaped molecular concentrations upon rectangular triggering signals to achieve the modulation function. We further design a microfluidic MC receiver capable of demodulating a received signal to a rectangular output signal using a thresholding reaction and an amplifying reaction. Our chemical reactions-based microfluidic molecular communication system is reproducible and its parameters can be optimized. More importantly, it overcomes the slow-speed, unreliability, and non-scalability of biological processes in cells. To reveal design insights, we also derive the theoretical signal responses for our designed microfluidic transmitter and receiver, which further facilitate the transmitter design optimization. Our theoretical results are validated via simulations performed through the COMSOL Multiphysics finite element solver. We demonstrate the predefined nature of the generated pulse and the demodulated rectangular signal together with their dependence on design parameters.
KW - Molecular communication
KW - chemical circuits
KW - chemical reaction
KW - genetic circuits
KW - microfluidic receiver
KW - microfluidic transmitter
KW - microfluidics
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U2 - 10.1109/TCOMM.2020.2993633
DO - 10.1109/TCOMM.2020.2993633
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85091834226
SN - 1558-0857
VL - 68
SP - 5590
EP - 5605
JO - IEEE Transactions on Communications
JF - IEEE Transactions on Communications
IS - 9
M1 - 9090868
ER -