Fluid dynamics-based distance estimation algorithm for macroscale molecular communication

摘要

Many species, from single-cell bacteria to advanced animals, use molecular communication (MC) toshare information with each other via chemical signals. Although MC is mostly studied in microscale,new practical applications emerge in macroscale. It is essential to derive an estimation method forchannel parameters such as distance for practical macroscale MC systems which include a sprayeremitting molecules as a transmitter (TX) and a sensor as the receiver (RX). Due to the similaritybetween sneezing/coughing and spraying mechanisms, these practical systems have the potential tobe applied in modeling airborne pathogen (viruses, bacteria, etc.) transmission with a MC perspectivewhere an infected human emitting pathogen-laden droplets is considered as a TX. In this paper, anovel approach based on fluid dynamics is proposed for the derivation of the distance estimation inpractical MC systems. According to this approach, transmitted molecules are considered as movingand evaporating droplets in the MC channel. With this approach, the Fluid Dynamics-based DistanceEstimation (FDDE) algorithm which predicts the propagation distance of the transmitted dropletsby updating the diameter of evaporating droplets at each time step is proposed. FDDE algorithm isvalidated by experimental data. The results reveal that the distance can be estimated by the fluiddynamics approach which introduces novel parameters such as the volume fraction of droplets ina mixture of air and liquid droplets and the beamwidth of the TX. Furthermore, the effect of theevaporation is shown with the numerical results.