Design and Optimizing of On-Chip Kinesin Substrates for Molecular Communication

Lab-on-chip devices and point-of-care diagnostic chip devices are composed of many different components such as nanosensors that must be able to communicate with other components within the device. Molecular communication is a promising solution for on-chip communication. In particular, kinesin driven microtubule (MT) motility is an effective means of transferring information particles from one component to another. However, finding an optimal shape for these channels can be challenging. In this paper we derive a mathematical optimization model that can be used to find the optimal channel shape and dimensions for any transmission period. We derive three specific models for the rectangular channels, regular polygonal channels, and regular polygonal ring channels. We show that the optimal channel shapes are the square-shaped channel for the rectangular channel, and circular-shaped channel for the other classes of shapes. Finally, we show that among all 2 dimensional shapes the optimal design choice that maximizes information rate is the circular-shaped channel.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnolog

Optimal Detection for Diffusion-Based Molecular Timing Channels

This work studies optimal detection for communication over diffusion-based molecular timing (DBMT) channels. The transmitter simultaneously releases multiple information particles, where the information is encoded in the time of release. The receiver decodes the transmitted information based on the random time of arrival of the information particles, which is modeled as an additive noise channel. For a DBMT channel without flow, this noise follows the L\'evy distribution. Under this channel model, the maximum-likelihood (ML) detector is derived and shown to have high computational complexity. It is also shown that under ML detection, releasing multiple particles improves performance, while for any additive channel with $\alpha$-stable noise where $\alpha<1$ (such as the DBMT channel), under linear processing at the receiver, releasing multiple particles degrades performance relative to releasing a single particle. Hence, a new low-complexity detector, which is based on the first arrival (FA) among all the transmitted particles, is proposed. It is shown that for a small number of released particles, the performance of the FA detector is very close to that of the ML detector. On the other hand, error exponent analysis shows that the performance of the two detectors differ when the number of released particles is large.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures. Submitted for publicatio