Error and energy when communicating with spins

Abstract

We consider a network composed of a finite set of communicating nodes that send individual particles to each other, and each particle can carry binary information. Though our main motivation is related to communications in nanonetworks with electrons that carry magnetic spin as the bipolar information, one can also imagine that the particles may be molecules that use chirality to convey information. Since it is difficult for a particle to carry an identifier that conveys the identity of the "source" or "destination", each node receives particles whose source cannot be ascertained since physical imperfections may result in particles being directed to the wrong destination in a manner that interferes with the correctly directed particles, and particles that should arrive at a node may be received by some other node. In addition we consider the effect of noise which randomly switches the polarity of particles, and in the case of magnetic spin we also have the effect of entanglement. We compute the probability of error in such a network, and estimate the flow of particles that is needed, and the average energy consumption per particle, to insure a correct reception of the binary data carried by the flow.