When bacteria talk : time elapse communication for super-slow networks

• Main Author: Krishnaswamy, Bhuvana
• Other Authors: Sivakumar, Raghupathy
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: Georgia Institute of Technology 2014
• Subjects: Molecular communication; On-off keying; Time elapse communication; Bacteria; Nanoscience; Nanotechnology; Microfluidics; Communication
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/50312

In this work we consider nano-scale communication using bacterial popula- tions as transceivers. We demonstrate using a microfluidic test-bed and a population of genetically engineered Escherichia coli bacteria serving as the communication re- ceiver that a simple modulation like on-off keying (OOK) is indeed achievable, but 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 severe limitations of TEC under practical non-zero error conditions in the target environment, and propose an advanced communication strategy called smart time elapse communication (TEC-SMART) that achieves over a 10x improvement in data-rate over OOK.