Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

This proposal concerns molecular communication. Molecular communication is a rapidly emerging technique with numerous applications, including nanoscale networking and communication in harsh environments. Using molecular communication, the transmitter encodes messages by releasing patterns of molecules, and conveys those messages to the receiver using physical principles such as Brownian motion. For example, a bit could be sent by releasing one or more molecules of a detectable compound such as ethanol (representing 1), or releasing nothing (representing 0), as a form of on-off keying. The compound could propagate from transmitter to receiver using free diffusion, and an ethanol detector at the receiver would measure when the molecules arrive. Noise in this example takes the form of either the random propagation process of the molecules, or noise in the detector. Many other modulation techniques have been proposed and studied in the molecular communication literature.In this project we answer the following research questions:1. What are appropriate information-theoretic models for molecular communication systems, and what are the associated information-theoretic capacities?2. Can we obtain an information-theoretic understanding of nanobiological systems?3. Can we miniaturize low-cost "macroscale" molecular communication testbeds, bringing them closer to the size needed for nanobiological applications?4. Can we illustrate the practical value of molecular communication by constructing demonstration systems?The first two questions are theoretical in nature, and will extend our knowledge of the ultimate limits of molecular communication. Answers to these questions will help us to understand what kind of applications are possible with molecular communications, and what kind are infeasible. Moreover, understanding nanobiological systems from an information-theoretic perspective may give us greater understanding of natural nanobiological systems, such as microbes.The last two questions are practical in nature, and will help us bring our theoretical knowledge of molecular communication to realization in practice. Answers to these questions will bring us closer to the futuristic possibilities of nanomedicine, and will open up new application areas (such as infrastructure monitoring) that are difficult to solve with conventional radio communication.