Information Theoretic Modeling of Interspecies Molecular Communication

TL;DR

This paper develops an information-theoretic model for interspecies molecular communication via VOCs, accounting for environmental noise and biological receptor responses, providing fundamental insights into plant-insect chemical signaling.

Contribution

It introduces a probabilistic framework modeling receptor responses with multinomial distributions, capturing environmental effects on VOC-based communication.

Findings

Communication efficiency varies with wind speed and distance.

Receptor response probabilities are influenced by environmental noise.

The model offers insights into biological signaling under realistic conditions.

Abstract

Plants and insects communicate using chemical signals like volatile organic compounds (VOCs). A plant encodes information using different blends of VOCs, which propagate through the air to represent different symbolic information. This communication occurs in a noisy environment, characterized by wind, distance, and complex biological reactions. At the receiver, cross-reactive olfactory receptors produce stochastic binding events whose discretized durations form the receiver observation. In this paper, an information-theoretic framework is developed to model interspecies molecular communication (MC), where receptor responses are modeled probabilistically using a multinomial distribution. Numerical results show that the communication depends on environmental parameters such as wind speed, distance, and the number of released molecules. The proposed framework provides fundamental insights into the VOC-based interspecies communication under realistic biological and environmental conditions.