Mobile Human Ad Hoc Networks: A Communication Engineering Viewpoint on Interhuman Airborne Pathogen Transmission

Abstract

Pathogens such as viruses and bacteria play a vital role in human life, since they cause infectious diseases which can lead to epidemics. Recent coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic has shown that taking effective prevention measures such as wearing masks are important to reduce the human deaths and side effects of the epidemic. It is therefore requisite to accurately model the spread of infectious diseases whose one of the most crucial routes of transmission is airborne transmission. The transmission models in the literature are proposed independently from each other, at different scales and by the researchers from various disciplines. Thus, there is a need to merge all these research attempts. To this end, we propose a communication engineering approach that melts different disciplines such as epidemiology, biology, medicine, and fluid dynamics in the same pot to model airborne pathogen transmission among humans. In this approach, we introduce the concept of mobile human ad hoc networks (MoHANETs). This concept exploits the similarity of airborne transmission-driven human groups with mobile ad hoc networks and uses molecular communication as the enabling paradigm. The aim of this article is to present a unified framework using communication engineering, and to highlight future research directions for modeling the spread of infectious diseases among humans through airborne pathogen transmission. In this article, we first review the airborne pathogen transmission mechanisms. Then, the MoHANET is given with a layered structure. In these layers, the infectious human emitting pathogen-laden droplets through air and the exposed human to these droplets are considered as the transmitter and receiver, respectively. Moreover, the experimental methods for the proposed approach are reviewed and discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE Communications Magazine Feature Topic on Nano-Networking for Nano-, Micro-, and Macro-Scale Application