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A Molecular Communication System Model Based on Biological Circuits

Published: 06 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Molecular Communication (MC), i.e., the exchange of information through the emission, propagation, and reception of molecules, is a promising paradigm for the interconnection of autonomous nanoscale devices, known as nanomachines. Synthetic biology techniques, and in particular the engineering of biological circuits, are enabling research towards the programming of functions within biological cells, thus paving the way for the realization of biological nanomachines. The design of MC systems built upon biological circuits is particularly interesting since cells naturally employ the MC paradigm in their interactions, and possess many of the elements required to realize this type of communication. This paper focuses on the identification and systems-theoretic modeling of a minimal subset of biological circuit elements necessary to be included in an MC system design where the message-bearing molecules are propagated via free diffusion between two cells. The system-theoretic models are here detailed in terms of transfer functions, from which analytical expressions are derived for the attenuation and the delay experienced by an information signal through the MC system. Numerical results are presented to evaluate the attenuation and delay expressions as functions of realistic biological parameters.

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        cover image ACM Other conferences
        NANOCOM' 14: Proceedings of ACM The First Annual International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication
        May 2014
        194 pages
        ISBN:9781450329798
        DOI:10.1145/2619955
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 06 May 2014

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        Author Tags

        1. Molecular Communication
        2. Nanonetworks
        3. Synthetic Biology

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        View all
        • (2020)Initial Distance Estimation and Signal Detection for Diffusive Mobile Molecular CommunicationIEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience10.1109/TNB.2020.298631419:3(422-433)Online publication date: Jul-2020
        • (2019)A Cross-Layer Approach for Optimization of MolCom Systems Toward the Internet of Bio-NanoThingsIEEE Systems Journal10.1109/JSYST.2018.287720713:3(2751-2762)Online publication date: Sep-2019
        • (2018)Past Results, Present Trends, and Future Challenges in Intrabody CommunicationWireless Communications & Mobile Computing10.1155/2018/90268472018(37)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
        • (2018)Using spatial partitioning to reduce receiver signal variance in diffusion-based molecular communicationProceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication10.1145/3233188.3233192(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2018
        • (2017)Improving the Capacity of Molecular Communication Using Enzymatic Reaction CyclesIEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience10.1109/TNB.2017.275323016:8(744-754)Online publication date: Dec-2017
        • (2015)Maximum A-Posteriori Decoding for Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication Using Analog FiltersIEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology10.1109/TNANO.2015.246930114:6(1054-1067)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2015

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