Molecular Communication Between Two Populations of Bacteria

TL;DR

This paper investigates the theoretical limits of molecular communication between bacterial populations, modeling each as a reliable node, and analyzes information transfer rates and error probabilities with different modulation schemes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model of bacterial populations as reliable communication nodes and analyzes their information transfer capabilities using information theory.

Findings

The communication rate increases with the number of bacteria per node.

M-ary modulation schemes can achieve higher data rates with manageable error probabilities.

Theoretical limits depend on molecular production errors and diffusion dynamics.

Abstract

Molecular communication is an expanding body of research. Recent advances in biology have encouraged using genetically engineered bacteria as the main component in the molecular communication. This has stimulated a new line of research that attempts to study molecular communication among bacteria from an information-theoretic point of view. Due to high randomness in the individual behavior of the bacterium, reliable communication between two bacteria is almost impossible. Therefore, we recently proposed that a population of bacteria in a cluster is considered as a node capable of molecular transmission and reception. This proposition enables us to form a reliable node out of many unreliable bacteria. The bacteria inside a node sense the environment and respond accordingly. In this paper, we study the communication between two nodes, one acting as the transmitter and the other as the receiver. We consider the case in which the information is encoded in the concentration of molecules by the transmitter. The molecules produced by the bacteria in the transmitter node propagate in the environment via the diffusion process. Then, their concentration sensed by the bacteria in the receiver node would decode the information. The randomness in the communication is caused by both the error in the molecular production at the transmitter and the reception of molecules at the receiver. We study the theoretical limits of the information transfer rate in such a setup versus the number of bacteria per node. Finally, we consider M-ary modulation schemes and study the achievable rates and their error probabilities.