Reading Articles with Our Noses: A Bio-Inspired Solution for Synthetic Molecular Communications

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Molecular communication (MC) is a new paradigm in communication engineering where molecules are employed as information carriers. MC systems are expected to enable new revolutionary applications such as smart drug delivery in medicine and monitoring of oil pipelines or chemical reactors in industrial settings. Despite the recent advancements in this emerging field, the interference caused by the dispersive MC channel still remains a major challenge for the design of reliable and high data-rate MC systems. Fortunately, nature has developed an evolutionary solution to this challenge which is applied by e.g. mammalian olfactory systems. The basic idea is to employ 1) a large number of different types of signaling molecules such that the same type of molecule is not frequently used and 2) a simple receiver architecture with a small number of receptor types that is able to recognize multiple simultaneously released molecule types. For example, humans are able to discriminate many thousands of chemicals by using only a few hundred types of receptors on their inner nose surface. We refer to these systems as Small number of Receptors for a Large number of Molecule types (SRLM) systems. In this project, we propose to use the SRLM concept as the basis for the design of synthetic MC systems to facilitate efficient interference mitigation and high data rates. This is the first project worldwide that investigates the use of bio-inspired SRLM systems for synthetic MCs. In particular, this project comprises the corresponding communication theoretical channel modeling, transmitter and receiver design, and system performance analysis and simulation of SRLM systems. The proposed bio-inspired SRLM systems are expected to be more reliable and to achieve higher data rates compared to state-of-the-art solutions and hence will further advance the emerging field of synthetic MCs.