Time-Elapse Communication: Bacterial Communication on a Microfluidic Chip

Bacterial populations housed in microfluidic environments can serve as transceivers for molecular communication, but the data-rates are extremely low (e.g., 10 -5 bits per second.). In this work, genetically engineered Escherichia coli bacteria were maintained in a microfluidic device where their re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on communications 2013-12, Vol.61 (12), p.5139-5151
Main Authors: Krishnaswamy, Bhuvana, Austin, Caitlin M., Bardill, J. Patrick, Russakow, Daniel, Holst, Gregory L., Hammer, Brian K., Forest, Craig R., Sivakumar, Raghupathy
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Exact sciences and technology
Microorganisms
Molecular communication
on-off keying
Radiocommunications
Receivers
Signal to noise ratio
Sociology
Statistics
Systems, networks and services of telecommunications
Telecommunications
Telecommunications and information theory
time elapse communication
Time measurement
Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments)
Transmitters. Receivers
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Summary:Bacterial populations housed in microfluidic environments can serve as transceivers for molecular communication, but the data-rates are extremely low (e.g., 10 -5 bits per second.). In this work, genetically engineered Escherichia coli bacteria were maintained in a microfluidic device where their response to a chemical stimulus was examined over time. The bacteria serve as a communication receiver where a simple modulation such as on-off keying (OOK) is achievable, although it suffers from very poor data-rates. We explore an alternative communication strategy called time-elapse communication (TEC) that uses the time period between signals to encode information. We identify the limitations of TEC under practical non-zero error conditions and propose an advanced communication strategy called smart time-elapse communication (TEC-SMART) that achieves over a 10x improvement in data-rate over OOK. We derive the capacity of TEC and provide a theoretical maximum data-rate that can be achieved.
ISSN:0090-6778
1558-0857
DOI:10.1109/TCOMM.2013.111013.130314