Chemical Reactions-Based Microfluidic Transmitter and Receiver for Molecular Communication

Abstract

The design of communication systems capable of processing and exchanging information through molecules and chemical processes is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field, which holds the promise to revolutionize how we realize computing and communication devices. While molecular communication (MC) theory has had major developments in recent years, more practical aspects in designing components capable of MC functionalities remain less explored. Motivated by this, we design a microfluidic MC system with a microfluidic MC transmitter and a microfluidic MC receiver based on chemical reactions.Considering existing MC literature on information transmission via molecular pulse modulation, the proposed microfluidic MC transmitter is capable of generating continuously predefined pulse-shaped molecular concentrations upon rectangular triggering signals using chemical reactions inspired by how cells generate pulse-shaped molecular signals in biology. We further design a microfluidic MC receiver capable of demodulating a received signal to a rectangular output signal using a thresholding reaction and an amplifying reaction. Our chemical reactions-based microfluidic molecular communication system is reproducible and well-designed, and more importantly, it overcomes the slow-speed, unreliability, and non-scalability of biological processes in cells. To reveal design insights, we also derive the theoretical signal responses for our designed microfluidic transmitter and receiver, which further facilitate the transmitter design optimization. Our theoretical results are validated via simulations performed through D. Bi and Y. Deng are with the

Chemical Reactions-Based Microfluidic Transmitter and Receiver Design for Molecular Communication

“…Unlike genetic circuits, chemical circuits are much easier to be controlled, and their integration with microfluidic devices brings advantages in low reagents consumption, rapid analysis, and high efficiency [29]. In [26], [27], we designed an MC microfluidic transceiver based on chemical reactions to successfully realize the binary concentration shift keying (BCSK) modulation and demodulation functions. The signal processing capability of chemical reactions-based microfluidic circuits is further exploited in [28], where we provided the designs of the AND gate, NAND gate, NOR gate, OR gate, and XOR gate, which are validated through COMSOL simulations.…”

“…Echoing the discussion in [28], one challenge in realizing signal processing functions via chemical reactions-based microfluidic circuits design is the theoretical characterization of the logic gate, which facilitates the design parameters selection for the expected gate outputs. Although we mathematically modelled the dynamics of molecular species in microfluidic channels in [26], [27], this analysis is not scalable with the increase in the number of microfluidic circuits.…”

“…• We first present a chemical reactions-based microfluidic AND gate design, based on which, we design the microfluidic transmitter and receiver with quadruple concentration shift keying (QCSK) modulation and demodulation functionalities, to show how logic computations can process molecular concentrations. Compared with the BCSK transceiver in [27], the QCSK transceiver can achieve two bits signal transmission with improved data rate.…”

“…Although the solution of ( 16) with a rectangular input has been derived in [27], its complex expression does not allow the cascaded channels to be mathematically solvable in closed-form.…”

“…With the derived AND gate inputs C I1/I2 (x 1 , t) in ( 42) and C P 1/P 2 (x 1 , t) in ( 43), the transmitter output C i O (t) can be expressed using Theorem 2 by interchanging the parameters To detect four concentration levels at the output of our proposed QCSK transmitter, we first design three detection microfluidic units in Fig. 8 to serve as a front-end processing module for the QCSK receiver, where each detection unit follows the receiver design in our initial work [27],…”