Tabletop Molecular Communication: Text Messages through Chemical Signals

TLDR

Molecular communication is attractive for applications where conventional wireless systems perform poorly, such as nanotechnology and urban health monitoring. The authors present the first modular, programmable platform that transmits text messages via chemical signaling and call for more realistic modeling, analysis, and design of such systems. They demonstrate the platform as a testbed, illustrating its communication features through experimental examples. The inexpensive experimental platform fills a gap in the literature, revealing that real molecular communication systems are nonlinear yet still support reliable communication.

Abstract

In this work, we describe the first modular, and programmable platform capable of transmitting a text message using chemical signalling – a method also known as molecular communication. This form of communication is attractive for applications where conventional wireless systems perform poorly, from nanotechnology to urban health monitoring. Using examples, we demonstrate the use of our platform as a testbed for molecular communication, and illustrate the features of these communication systems using experiments. By providing a simple and inexpensive means of performing experiments, our system fills an important gap in the molecular communication literature, where much current work is done in simulation with simplified system models. A key finding in this paper is that these systems are often nonlinear in practice, whereas current simulations and analysis often assume that the system is linear. However, as we show in this work, despite the nonlinearity, reliable communication is still possible. Furthermore, this work motivates future studies on more realistic modelling, analysis, and design of theoretical models and algorithms for these systems.