A Microfluidic Platform for Modeling Molecular Communication

Abstract

Molecular communication (MC) exploits the opportunities to build up a communication link at a small scale to improve the capabilities of nanomachines by forming a network between multiple machines. Even though there are significant theoretical and conceptual frameworks for the further advancement of MC, only a few studies seem to deal with more practical aspects of communication theory, especially on a micro-scale. To this extent, this paper presents an experimental platform based on microfluidics to investigate the physical response of MC environments to enable practical applications. In this communication scenario, polystyrene microbeads are used to convey the information in a controlled microenvironment to transmit encoded data under continuous pressure-driven background flow. The observation is performed with an integrated optical setup. The resulting videos are processed by an image processing algorithm for automated particle recognition and counting. Outcome data are decoded to reproduce the transmitted bit sequences. By adopting the number of microbeads as the information carrier, signals are modulated via on-off keying and demodulated in the same way. As a result, we achieve information transmission and particle detection in a microenvironment. The proposed experimental model’s behavior is also verified by simulations utilizing the COMSOL software.