Performance analysis of simultaneous communications in bacterial nanonetworks

Utilizing biological components for data transfer is considered as a promising technique for communications at nanoscales. The ability to store data in its DNA strands as well as natural mobility make flagellated bacteria a good candidate for such systems. The use of advanced mechanisms such as replication-based encoding and conjugation to improve the performance of bacterial nanonetworks as well as stochastic bacteria movement pattern make their performance assessment a non-trivial task. Universal analytical frameworks taking into account these mechanisms are still missing. The situation is complicated by the possibility of having more than a single transmitter–receiver (Tx–Rx) pair communicating in the environment of interest. In this paper, we develop a framework to characterize performance of the bacterial networks taking all the abovementioned mechanisms into account and capable to address the case of simultaneous communications between a number of Tx–Rx pairs. The framework is based on the absorbing Markov chains theory and allows to reveal inherent trade-offs related to delay performance of bacterial nanonetworks.