Using bacterial concentration as means of dissipating information through chemotaxis

Utilizing bacteria in communications has emerged as a promising solution to delineating peculiarities at the nanoscale level. Usually, bacteria are used as carriers of molecules, which are exchanged in order to dissipate information. This work proposes a system, whereby bacterial concentration is used to transfer information. Chemotaxis plays a central role in the scheme. The investigation targets the examination and comparison of two different methodologies, where either the server uses chemorepellent or the clients use chemoattractant substances to bring about the chemotaxis effect. Performance of the proposed topologies was investigated through simulation. In the simulated experiments performed, random messages were encoded in the bacterial concentration using a simple on-off keying modulation, which then the receivers decode to recover the initial message. The experiments demonstrate the differences between the two strategies under various topologies, show the superior performance achieved in the case of chemoattractant clients, and highlight the influence of the parameters of distance, number of sensors and number of bacteria per pulse on the received signal amplitude and achievable bit error rate.