Section: Application Domains

Molecular communications

Many communication mechanisms are based on acoustic or electromagnetic propagation; however, the general theory of communication is much more widely applicable. One recent proposal is molecular communication, where information is encoded in the type, quantity, or time or release of molecules. This perspective has interesting implications for the understanding of biochemical processes and also chemical-based communication where other signaling schemes are not easy to use (e.g., in mines). Our work in this area focuses on two aspects: (i) the fundamental limits of communication (i.e., how much data can be transmitted within a given period of time); and (ii) signal processing strategies which can be implemented by circuits built from chemical reaction-diffusion systems.

A novel perspective introduced within our work is the incorporation of coexistence constraints. That is, we consider molecular communication in a crowded biochemical environment where communication should not impact pre-existing behavior of the environment. This has lead to new connections with communication subject to security constraints as well as the stability theory of stochastic chemical reaction-diffusion systems and systems of partial differential equations which provide deterministic approximations.