Publication

Abstract : Molecular communication is an emerging field of communication. It allows biological nanomachines to communicate through exchanging molecules in an aqueous environment and to perform collaborative tasks through integrating functionalities of individual biological nanomachines [1].Traditional communication mechanism are not suitable for nanonetworks mainly due to the smaller dimensions of transmitters, receivers and other components [2,3,4]. Biological cells use molecular communication that involves both the intra-cellular or inter-cellular molecular communication using chemical signals to accomplish biological functions like respiration, nerve impulse conduction, hormone secretion, etc. One form of molecular communication is calcium (Ca2+) signaling in which the concentration of a stream of Ca2+ ions are modulated spatio-temporally to bring about processes like muscle contraction, cell differentiation, hormone secretion, etc. In this paper, we model the physical channel layer using Ca2+ signaling and verify the protocol stack components of the physical channel defined by IEEE 1906.1 standard [5]. Next, we run the solution scheme for this model in MATLAB to evaluate the modulation and signal propagation of Ca2+ signaling in an inter-cellular environment and discuss results to explain the behavior of physical channel.