A Novel Bacteria-Based Broadcast System Exploiting Chemotaxis

Abstract

Bacterial and molecular-based communication has recently emerged as one of the paradigms for establishing communication environments in the nanoscale. This paper presents a novel bacteria-based communication system exploiting the phenomenon of chemotaxis. Such a system could provide solutions in applications with the requirement for biocompatibility or low power consumption. In order to demonstrate and investigate the properties of this system, a simulator was employed and experiments were performed, where bits were transmitted using bacteria release pulses and successfully received at a sensor node. The experiments highlight the value of the chemotaxis phenomenon for augmenting information transfer as well as the influence of the parameters of distance and number of bacteria per pulse on the received signal strength and achievable bit error rate.