Nanocommunication via FRET With DyLight Dyes Using Multiple Donors and Acceptors

Abstract

The phenomenon of Förster Resonance Energy Transfer, commonly used to measure the distances between fluorophore molecules and to study interactions between fluorescent-tagged proteins in life sciences, can also be applied in nanocommunication networks to transfer information bits. The mechanism offers a relatively large throughput and very small delays, but at the same time the channel bit error rate is too high and the transmission ranges are too limited for communication purposes. In this paper, multiple donors at the transmitter side and multiple acceptors at the receiver side are considered to decrease the bit error rate. As nanoantennas, the DyLight fluorescent dyes, which are very well suited to long range nanocommunication due to their large Förster distances and high degrees of labeling, are proposed. The reported results of the recent laboratory experiments confirm efficient communication on distances over 10 nm.

Index Modulation for Molecular Communication via Diffusion Systems

“…A macro-scale molecular MIMO system testbed is built and introduced in [6] and [10], experimentally confirming the previous theoretical advantages of introducing MIMO to molecular communications. In addition, [11] and [12] realize an Alexa Fluor dyebased lab implementation, introducing another physical testbed for a molecular MIMO scheme.…”

Routing in FRET-Based Nanonetworks

“…4), we investigated a scenario of a single donor and multiple acceptors which was like a SIMO (singleinput multi-output) channel. In real applications, all the donor molecules may be excited at once using full MIMO communication, which can additionally increase the FRET efficiency comparing with the values shown in this article [7][8].…”

“…While the point-to-point communication via FRET, with its parameters like bit error rate, channel capacity, throughput, and signal propagation delay, was analyzed and measured in previous papers [5][6][7][8], the main motivation for this article is to go a step further and propose possible routing mechanisms in FRET-based nanonetworks. When thinking about fully operational nanonetworks, there must be not only point-topoint links, but also multi-hop connections.…”

“…This is why the FRET values are rather low for the telecommunication purposes. Fortunately, using MIMO-FRET and suitable coding techniques with enough redundancy, the FRET-based nanocommunications can guarantee bit error rate at the level of 10 -6 [8]. The results also raise an issue of undesired signal leakages: when the donor Atto 425 at the nanorouter is excited, 37 percent of the signal is transferred to the AF 488 at the first nanoreceiver, but at the same time 8 percent passes to AF 750 at the second nanoreceiver.…”

“…This effectively places a limit on FRET transmission distances to about 10 nanometers. Recent works [7][8] have shown that the FRET efficiency and transmission range can be additionally increased when using multiple donors at the transmitter side and multiple acceptors at the receiver side of the nanocommunication channel. Such a technique is called MIMO-FRET, following the idea of multiantenna systems well known in wireless communication.…”