On attractant scheduling in networks based on bacterial communication

In this paper, we explore the problem of attractant scheduling in networks based on bacterial communication. Bacterial communication is a communication paradigm between biological cells which involves the physical motion of flagellated bacteria such as E. coli from the transmitter to the receiver using chemical attractants. Although bacterial communication occurs in nature, engineering such communication links is non-trivial because the number of attractants is limited in practice. Thus scheduling among bacterial communication links is required when there are multiple information transmitter-receiver pairs in the same vicinity. We analyze this problem and model the delay and information loss in such environments. We validate our model using simulations. Our study provides new insights for the design of attractant scheduling algorithms in multi-node bacterial communication networks.