1 research outputs found
A Survey of Biological Building Blocks for Synthetic Molecular Communication Systems
Synthetic molecular communication (MC) is a new communication engineering
paradigm which is expected to enable revolutionary applications such as smart
drug delivery and real-time health monitoring. The design and implementation of
synthetic MC systems (MCSs) at nano- and microscale is very challenging. This
is particularly true for synthetic MCSs employing biological components as
transmitters and receivers or as interfaces with natural biological MCSs.
Nevertheless, since such biological components have been optimized by nature
over billions of years, using them in synthetic MCSs is highly promising. This
paper provides a survey of biological components that can potentially serve as
the main building blocks, i.e., transmitter, receiver, and signaling particles,
for the design and implementation of synthetic MCSs. Nature uses a large
variety of signaling particles of different sizes and with vastly different
properties for communication among biological entities. Here, we focus on three
important classes of signaling particles: cations (specifically protons and
calcium ions), neurotransmitters (specifically acetylcholine, dopamine, and
serotonin), and phosphopeptides. For each of these candidate signaling
particles, we present several specific transmitter and receiver structures
mainly built upon proteins that are capable of performing the distinct
physiological functionalities required from the transmitters and receivers of
MCSs. Moreover, we present options for both microscale implementation of MCSs
as well as the micro-to-macroscale interfaces needed for experimental
evaluation of MCSs. Furthermore, we outline new research directions for the
implementation and the theoretical design and analysis of the proposed
transmitter and receiver architectures.Comment: 70 pages, 11 figures, 9 tables; Accepted for publication in the IEEE
Communications Surveys & Tutorial