REACTION · Real-time Chemical Signal Processing for Microfluidic Molecular Communications: Design, Theory, Prototypes, and Applications

Conveying information over a distance has been a problem for decades and is urgently needed across a range of distance scales (from macro to nano) and diverse environments to ensure seamless connectivity everywhere. With the advantages of biocompatibility and energy efficiency, molecular communication (MC) has been proposed to carry information (e.g., text, image, robotic command) over a distance across macro to nanoscales via chemical signals using molecules, which is extremely important for scenarios where electromagnetic (EM) wave-based communications are unsuitable or prohibited, such as in micro- or nanoscales, tunnels, human bodies, or explosive gas environments. Until now, there exists a fundamental and long-standing challenge of the lack of microscale components that can perform real-time signal processing directly over chemical signals, which is crucial for MC transceivers and their applications. REACTION will address this fundamental challenge by drawing theory, methods, and techniques from disciplines, including communication engineering, chemistry, microfluidics, signal processing, and electronic engineering. REACTION aims to design, model, simulate, and prototype microfluidic MC transceivers and systems with complex microfluidic chemical circuits, for information exchange across different scales and environments. These circuits will be capable of performing real-time chemical signal processing across diverse concentration profiles, multiple types of concurrent molecules, and consecutive chemical pulses. The successful implementation of these designs will bring 1) a new solution for multi-robotic communication in microscale via airborne MC prototype, 2) new digital olfactory devices with the capability of gas-phase scent profile detection, transmission, and recreation for the Internet of Senses; and 3) an optimized drug injection design for efficient drug delivery.