Opportunistic routing through conjugation in bacteria communication nanonetwork

As the field of molecular communication continues to grow, numerous solutions have been proposed to enable communication between nanomachines. Amongst these solutions, bacteria communication nanonetworks has been proposed as a promising approach for molecular communication. This is driven by a number of attractive properties found in bacteria, which includes biased motility toward the destination through chemotaxis process, as well as the ability of bacteria to transfer genetic information between each other using conjugation. Bacterial conjugation is a major mechanism for Lateral Gene Transfer (LGT) that enables information transfer among bacteria. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic routing process in bacteria communication network using these two properties. The paper presents the simulation work to analyze the performance of message delivery for three different topology shapes, which includes grid, hexagon, and T-shape topologies. The aim of simulating on different shape topologies is to determine the impact that conjugation will have to improve message delivery. In all topologies, the use of conjugation helped improve the reliability of message delivery to the destination point. The paper will analyze various commonly used metrics used in communication networks, such as the average delay, the number of messages, as well as the distribution of messages and their originating node. The conjugation process is most beneficial in complexed shaped topologies, where the directionality from the source to the destination is a number of hops apart, as represented in the T-shape topology.