“Information-friction” and its impact on minimum energy per communicated bit

Just as there are frictional losses associated with moving masses on a surface, what if there are frictional losses associated with moving information on a substrate? We propose to model these losses as proportional to “bit-meters” i.e., the product of mass of information (i.e., the number of bits) and the distance of information transport. For communication across a binary input AWGN channel decoded by decoders implemented using a simple circuit model, we derive unavoidable lower bounds on bit-meters for decoding computation. These bounds are translated into limits on energy consumption in decoding under the information-friction model. Using these lower bounds we show that the total (transmit + decoding) energy-per-bit must diverge to infinity as the target error probability is lowered.