A Survey of Biological Building Blocks for Synthetic Molecular Communication Systems

作者：Christian A. Söldner, E. Socher, Vahid Jamali, Wayan Wicke, Arman Ahmadzadeh, H. Breitinger, A. Burkovski, K. Castiglione, R. Schober, H. Sticht · 发表于：IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials · 年份：2019 · DOI：10.1109/comst.2020.3008819 · 被引用次数：64 · 研究领域：Computer Science

Synthetic molecular communication (MC) is a new communication engineering paradigm which is expected to enable revolutionary applications such as smart drug delivery and real-time health monitoring. The design and implementation of synthetic MC systems (MCSs) at nano- and microscale is very challenging. This is particularly true for synthetic MCSs employing biological components as transmitters and receivers or as interfaces with natural biological MCSs. Nevertheless, since such biological components have been optimized by nature over billions of years, using them in synthetic MCSs is highly promising. This paper provides a survey of biological components that can potentially serve as the main building blocks, i.e., transmitter, receiver, and signaling particles, for the design and implementation of synthetic MCSs. Nature uses a large variety of signaling particles of different sizes and with vastly different properties for communication among biological entities. Here, we focus on three important classes of signaling particles: cations (specifically protons and calcium ions), neurotransmitters (specifically acetylcholine, dopamine, and serotonin), and phosphopeptides. These three classes have unique and distinct features such as their large diffusion coefficients, their specificity, and/or their uniqueness of signaling that make them suitable candidates for signaling particles in synthetic MCSs. For each of these candidate signaling particles, we present several specific tra...