Designing a Light-based Communication System with a Biomolecular Receiver

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel light-based communication system utilizing a biomolecular receptor, demonstrating potential for high-speed bio-engineered communication by analyzing system performance and scalability.

Contribution

It introduces a new bio-inspired communication system using Channelrhodopsin-2, including encoding, modulation, and detection methods, and analyzes its performance and scalability.

Findings

Data rate increases with the number of receptors

System performance depends on parameter choices

High-speed communication is feasible with biomolecular receptors

Abstract

Biological systems transduce signals from their surroundings in numerous ways. This paper introduces a communication system using the light-gated ion channel Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), which causes an ion current to flow in response to light. Our design includes a ChR2-based receiver along with encoding, modulation techniques and detection. Analyzing the resulting communication system, we discuss the effect of different parameters on the performance of the system. Finally, we discuss its potential design in the context of bio-engineering and light-based communication and show that the data rate scales up with the number of receptors, indicating that high-speed communication may be possible.