Chemo Hydrodynamic Transceivers for the Internet of Bio-Nano Things, Modeling the Joint Propulsion Transmission trade-off

TL;DR

This paper models the complex interplay between propulsion and molecular communication in bio-nano transceivers, revealing a fundamental trade-off that impacts reliability and guiding protocol design for the Internet of Bio-Nano Things.

Contribution

It introduces a unified stochastic model capturing the physicochemical coupling of propulsion and communication in chemo-hydrodynamic transceivers, highlighting the trade-offs and optimal control strategies.

Findings

Actuation-induced motion causes significant signal variance.

Reliability peaks at an optimal actuation level, then sharply declines.

Neglecting active motility noise underestimates error probabilities.

Abstract

The Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) requires mobile nanomachines that navigate complex fluids while exchanging molecular signals under external supervision. We introduce the chemo-hydrodynamic transceiver, a unified model for catalytic Janus particles in which an external optical control simultaneously drives molecular emission and active self-propulsion. Unlike common abstractions that decouple mobility and communication, we derive a stochastic channel model that captures their physicochemical coupling and shows that actuation-induced distance jitter can dominate the received-signal variance, yielding a fundamental trade-off: stronger actuation increases emission but can sharply reduce reliability through motion-induced fading. Numerical results reveal a unimodal reliability profile with a critical actuation level beyond which the signal-to-noise ratio collapses, and an optimal control level that scales approximately linearly with link distance. Compared with Brownian-mobility baselines, the model exposes a pronounced estimation gap: neglecting active motility noise can underestimate the bit error probability by orders of magnitude. These findings provide physical-layer guidelines for mobility-aware IoBNT protocol design and closed-loop control of nanorobotic swarms.