Title:  Sensing and Molecular Communication using Synthetic Cells: Theory and Algorithms

Committee: 

Dr. Fekri, Advisor        

Dr. Sivakumar, Chair

Dr. Rozell

Abstract: The objective of this research is to establish the fundamental problems in molecular communication and design algorithms for reliable communication and sensing systems. We first study the communication channel through which the molecules propagate and analyze the achievable rate information transmission.  We also develop models to study the constraints imposed by the sensing process at the receiver and derive the maximum rate by which a receiver can sense information via ligand receptors.  Next, we employ synthetic bacteria as the basic element of a biologically compatible communication system.  We model the probabilistic behavior of bacteria and obtain the sensing capacity of a bio node. We propose M-ary concentration-based modulation and in order to improve the reliability, we introduce relaying and error-detecting codes for molecular communication. In a molecular bio-sensor, signal distortion is a matter of paramount importance. In the world of biology, distortion and error are mitigated through redundancy (e.g., number of sensors). The proposed research aims at establishing the rate-distortion theory for molecular sensing. We study the effect of receptor redundancy and obtain the optimal quantization that minimizes the distortion in the input concentration inference in a molecular sensor. We also study sensor cell arrays in which redundancy is introduced by using multiple types of biomarkers. In particular, we study the problem of detecting particular patterns of miRNA molecules in the environment via a biomarker array.