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Our world relies on communication. The capability to communicate and, more importantly, to be correctly understood, is an intrinsic need of humans. We have several ways to communicate, for example with our voice, or with our cell phones. Now, imagine speaking with a person after some hours at the spa when you are relaxed. You probably have a calm voice. Then, try to imagine repeating the conversation when you are in a hurry speaking much faster. In both cases you are sending the same message and while in the first case the possibility of being correctly understood by the other party is higher, in the second, the time needed to say the same words is lower. Biological cells communicate among each other too. The research in this paper focuses on finding a good trade-off between the velocity at which cells “speak” and their capability of being correctly understood.
This paper is an analysis of the communication performances of a diffusion-based molecular communication system in the presence of intersymbol interference. The received signal is approximated as a Poisson random variable, enabling an analytical derivation of upper and lower bounds on the channel capacity. Concentration shift keying is used as the modulation technique for encoding information in the system.
Being able to understand the mechanisms behind the communication among biological cells and how to maximize the correct exchange of information between them can have benefits in different fields. For example, it can help in identifying when there are “misunderstandings” in the communication that cause serious illness, as cancer, and how to correct them via the development of new medications. Another interesting example of application is in the field of agricultural processes. In fact, in this case, this knowledge can be exploited to ameliorate crops, thus allowing a better use of earth resources, that are limited.
We believe that molecular communication studies will play a fundamental role in a variety of fields in the near future. By consequence, the number of industry application will increase as the research in this direction goes on. One example out of many can be in the medical field. In fact, the development of new medications and of new machineries will be the starting of a huge change in the pharmaceutical industry. Next steps of this research include experimental work in a wet lab. This would allow validating our theoretical findings and starting investigating some possible practical applications. From a theoretical perspective, it would be interesting considering an environment with more than two cells, to study a more realistic scenario.
Publication Title: Predator-Prey Adaptive Control for Exosome-based Molecular Communications Glioblastoma Treatment
Authors: Hamdan Awan, Francesca Ratti, Fardad Vakilipoor, Maurizio Magarini
Publication Date: 27 January 2021
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multi-Scale Communications
Link to publication: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9336672