Multi-Hop Conjugation Based Bacteria Nanonetworks

Molecular communication is a new paradigm for nanomachines to exchange information, by utilizing biological mechanism and/or components to transfer information (e.g., molecular diffusion, neuronal networks, molecular motors). One possible approach for molecular communication is through the use of bacteria, which can act as carriers for DNA-based information, i.e., plasmids. This paper analyzes multi-hop molecular nanonetworks that utilize bacteria as a carrier. The proposed approach combines different properties of bacteria to enable multi-hop transmission, such as conjugation and chemotaxis-based motility. Various analyses have been performed, including the correlation between the success rate of plasmid delivery to the destination node, and the role of conjugation in enabling this; as well as analyses on the impact of large topology shapes (e.g., Grid, Random, and Scale-free) on the success rate of plasmid delivery for multiple source-destination nanonetworks. A further solution proposed in this paper is the application of antibiotics to act as filters on illegitimate messages that could be delivered by the bacteria. Our evaluation, which has been conducted through a series of simulations, has shown that numerous bacteria properties fit to properties required for communication networking (e.g., packet filtering, routing, addressing).