A Flooding-Based Droplet Routing Protocol for Digital Microfluidic Biochip

Abstract

Droplet routing is a critical phase in the biochemical synthesis using digital microfluidic biochip. The goal is to transport droplets from one module to another, maintaining fluidic constraint at every instant. In this paper, we proposed a new flooding-based droplet routing protocol. It uses multiple copies of scout packets to flood the whole biochip and discover multiple routes. The explored routes are then validated by hello packets. Route length defines the priority order among droplets. The routes are mapped using a new heuristic number of shared cells. In the compaction phase, generate the parallel moving sequence for droplets. The simulation result shows 12.25% and 20.5% improvement in the latest arrival time for free and virtual topology, respectively.