Explorando o Potencial da Molécula IP3 para a Comunicação em Nanorredes

Advances in bioengineering and nanotechnology have allowed the emergence of nanometer-sized devices, e.g., synthetic nanomachines, nanoantennas and nanoinjectors, able of detecting and actuating their environment. However, despite necessary, it is a big challenge to master the communication among them. The conventional electromagnetic communication is not a direct choice for nanonetworks in some specific medium and due to their scale. Hence, researchers have explored molecular communication. Particularly, this paper investigates the potential of the Inositol Triphosphate (IP3) molecule for data communication between nanodevices. We evaluate the space-time concentration of the IP3 molecule and how intracellular signaling inflluences over it in neuron cells (astrocytes). Compared to the calcium molecule performance, results from gain and channel communication are promising and assist in a further understanding of how to manage extracellular data transmission

A comprehensive survey of recent advancements in molecular communication

With much advancement in the field of nanotechnology, bioengineering and synthetic biology over the past decade, microscales and nanoscales devices are becoming a reality. Yet the problem of engineering a reliable communication system between tiny devices is still an open problem. At the same time, despite the prevalence of radio communication, there are still areas where traditional electromagnetic waves find it difficult or expensive to reach. Points of interest in industry, cities, and medical applications often lie in embedded and entrenched areas, accessible only by ventricles at scales too small for conventional radio waves and microwaves, or they are located in such a way that directional high frequency systems are ineffective. Inspired by nature, one solution to these problems is molecular communication (MC), where chemical signals are used to transfer information. Although biologists have studied MC for decades, it has only been researched for roughly 10 year from a communication engineering lens. Significant number of papers have been published to date, but owing to the need for interdisciplinary work, much of the results are preliminary. In this paper, the recent advancements in the field of MC engineering are highlighted. First, the biological, chemical, and physical processes used by an MC system are discussed. This includes different components of the MC transmitter and receiver, as well as the propagation and transport mechanisms. Then, a comprehensive survey of some of the recent works on MC through a communication engineering lens is provided. The paper ends with a technology readiness analysis of MC and future research directions

Internet-das-Bionano-Coisas: Conectando-se às Nanomáquinas

The Internet-of-things attracts the attention of many researchers in computer networks with the challenge of providing connectivity to a huge quantity of devices. This reality can be further complicated once again with the recent proposed Internet-of-bionano-things. Nanomachines, natural or synthetic, will be able to communicate to each other and to the Internet through the means of communication systems that are being developed at the nano-scale with the goal of cooperatively executing complex tasks. This technology requires a complete revision of the TCP/IP architecture to accommodate the requirements and demands of the nanonetworks. This chapter aims at introducing this research field to the computer network community, presenting the different types of communicating networks, an initial reformulation of the TCP/IP architecture, research challenges and the applications for the nanonetworks. This technology enables a revolution in the society and affects directly areas, such as medicine, agriculture, pollution and even industry

The design and performance analysis of diffusive molecular communication systems

Molecular Communications (MC) is an increasingly attractive technique to enable the networking of nano-machines by utilising molecules as the information carrier. The molecular diffusion can be described by either the movement of individual molecules or the molecular concentration. Accordingly, two kinds of diffusive MC systems have been modelled in previous literature. On the basis of these studies, the aim of this Ph.D. is to refine these two models, to implement functional transmission techniques and technologies, and to investigate the corresponding system performance. To fulfil this target, the whole Ph.D. is divided into two stages. During each stage, specific tasks have been accomplished, each contributing to the overarching research field of diffusive MC systems. In the first stage, an MC system model, named as the Model-I, is established and enhanced by focusing on the motion of individual molecules. The performance has been evaluated by both deriving mathematical expressions and implementing MATLAB simulations. Based on the Model-I, a distance estimation scheme has been proposed. Compared with existing methods, this new scheme is more accurate and less time-consuming. Moreover, five Stop-and-Wait Automatic Repeat reQuest (SW-AQR) protocols have been implemented on the Model-I. Results reveal that all these SW-ARQ schemes work well and can be beneficial under different circumstances. In the second stage, another MC system model, named as the Model-II, is established and refined with information conveyed by the molecular concentration. Both theoretical derivations and MATLAB simulations are provided to analyse the system reliability. Laid on this foundation, two distance measurement methods have been proposed and shown to be suitable for the Model-II. Additionally, to solve the long-range MC problem, relaying schemes have been applied by deploying a relay node between the source and target nano-machines. The performance improvement of each scheme is also illustrated respectively

Error control in bacterial quorum communications

Quorum sensing (QS) is used to describe the communication between bacterial cells, whereby a coordinated population response is controlled through the synthesis, accumulation and subsequent sensing of specific diffusible chemical signals called autoinducers, enabling a cluster of bacteria to regulate gene expression and behavior collectively and synchronously, and assess their own population. As a promising method of molecular communication (MC), bacterial populations can be programmed as bio-transceivers to establish information transmission using molecules. In this work, to investigate the key features for MC, a bacterial QS system is introduced, which contains two clusters of bacteria, specifically Vibrio fischeri, as the transmitter node and receiver node, and the diffusive channel. The transmitted information is represented by the concentration of autoinducers with on-off keying (OOK) modulation. In addition, to achieve better reliability and energy efficiency, different error control techniques, including forward error correction (FEC) and Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) are taken into consideration. For FEC, this work presents a comparison of the performance of traditional Hamming codes, Minimum Energy Codes (MEC) and Luby Transform (LT) codes over the channel. In addition, it applied several ARQ protocols, namely Stop-N-Wait (SW-ARQ), Go-Back-N (GBN-ARQ), and Selective-Repeat (SR-ARQ) combined with error detection codes to achieve better reliability. Results show that both the FEC and ARQ techniques can enhance the channel reliability, and that ARQ can resolve the issue of out-of-sequence and duplicate packet delivery. Moreover, this work further addresses the question of optimal frame size for data communication in this channel capacity and energy constrained bacterial quorum communication system. A novel energy model which is constructed using the experimental validated synthetic logic gates has been proposed to help with the optimization process. The optimal fixed frame length is determined for a set of channel parameters by maximizing the throughput and energy efficiency matrix