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SEMINAR REPORT
SUBMITTED BY
ANAND RAJ.G.R. (13402014)
October 2016
1
Seminar guide
Seminar Coordinator
Seminar Coordinator
Smt.Sandhya.L
Mr.Nelwin Raj N R
Smt.Subha V
Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor
Prof(Dr).Sheeja M K
SCTCE
2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
ABSTRACT
This topic involves the first modular, and programmable platform capable of transmitting a
text message usingchemical signalling
CONTENTS:
1.Introduction
1.1What is molecular communication? ................ 7
1.2 History ............................................................. 7
...........................................................9
Reference............................................................................ 24
5
List of figures:
Figure 1: Block diagram of typical communication system .................. 9
Figure 2: Transmitter components ........................................................11
Figure 3: Receiver components .............................................................12
Figure 4: Diffusion based versus flow based propagation .....................14
Figure 5: Flow chart representation that controls transmitter ................16
Figure 6:Flow chart representation that controls receiver .....................18
List of Tables:
Table 1: Different transmittion ratesand reliability ...............................20
1.Introduction:
1.1What is Molecular Communication?
This topic presents the worlds firstmacroscale molecular communication link to
reliably transmit acontinuous data stream. The system modulates alcohol molecules,which
are then diffused via ambient and induced air currents tocarry information to a receiver.
The communication distance isseveral meters and the propagation channel consists of both
free space and tunnel environments[2]. The goalis to show that molecules can be used as
an alternative toelectromagnetic (EM) waves in challenging environments whereEM
waves do not perform well[21-24].
1.2 History
The transfer ofdata using chemicals between organismshas been observed throughout
history. Most notably, CharlesDarwin observed the relationship between chemical signalsand
mating patterns in 1871. In the 20th century, the termpheromone was coined to mean a
transfer
of
excitement.
Thus
molecularcommunicationsliterature
far,
have
the
vast
focused
on
majority
nano-scale
of
nano-
intraand
and
inter-cell
communications[26]. There have alsobeen a number of attempts at mimicking pheromonebasedcommunication[4]. More recently, this team has proposed anddemonstrated that
molecular communications over macroscaledistances is not only possible, but also reliable.
Thisdemonstration for the first time
communication link.
The end product must be inexpensive to build. This wouldmake the platform readily
available for many differentresearch and development projects with limited amount
offounding.
The designed system must be simple and robust, much thesame as the telegraph, the
ancestor of modern telecommunicationsystems.
Any communication system can be broken down into threemajor parts: the transmitter, the
receiver, and the channel.Figure1shows block diagram representation of these three
modulesand their submodules.
2.2.1Transmitter:
The transmitter takes an input text message from a user. It thenconverts the text
message into a sequence of binary bits andmodulates them on a chemical signal for
propagation in thechannel.
Transmitter Design:
On the transmission side, the hardware consists of:
i)
ii)
a microcontroller that convertsthe input text into binary sequences and then
modulates thesequence on chemical signals,
iii)
a reservoir of chemicals,
User interface:
For text entry, the 1662 character LCD Shield Kit from Adafruit is used. The LCDis
an add-on module for the Arduino microcontroller board, whichalso has six push buttons. A
program is written in the Arduinomicrocontroller which employs the LCD and its buttons for
textentry by the user[.
Microcontroller:
To control all transmission operations, theArduino Uno open-source electronics
prototyping platform is used, whichis an ATmega328 based microcontroller board.
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2.2.3Receiver:
To design the receiver, a sensor is required that is capable of detecting achemical
signal. The data from the sensor is processedby the demodulation and detection algorithms,
and finallydecoded into text.
Receiver Design:
On the receiver side, the hardware consists of:
i)
a chemical sensor,
ii)
iii)
Chemical Sensor:
Three different candidate sensors fordemodulation and detection at the receiver: MQ3, MQ303A,MR513 alcohol sensors, all of which are manufactured by HenanHanwei
Electronics Co. Ltd. of China. All three sensors use ametal oxide semiconductor detection
layer for detecting thealcohol[27], but each has a different sensitivity, power and
operationcircuit diagrams. Besides isopropyl alcohol, the sensors can detectother types of
alcohol such as ethanol. However, in this workonly use isopropyl is used. All three sensors
were implemented on a custommadePCB board as shown in Figure 3.
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Diffusion:
In the diffusion basedpropagation, after the initial spray the alcohol diffuses in the
airuntil it reaches the receiver. The diffusion propagation does not require external energy
(beyondthe energy required to release the chemical message)In flow based propagation, a
tabletopfan is used to guide the alcohol towards the receiver.
The system response (the output of the sensor for asingle short spray) under both
propagation schemes (diffusion andflow assisted propagations) was compared. At short
distances (up to 1 meter), thediffusion based propagation scheme performs well because
thealcohol ejected from the spray reaches the sensors almostinstantaneously. However, if the
spray is placed further away,diffusion based propagation would not be practical because of
theextremely slow system response[5]. This effect can be seen in Figure 4,where the system
response to a very short sprayof 250ms induration is plotted for both diffusion based and flow
basedpropagations. The flow in this figure is generated usingHoneywell fan on the high
setting, and the spray is placed at adistance of 2 meters from the detection sensor.
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As can be seen, thesystem has a quick and distinct response when flow based
propagation is employed. Although the response is plotted for onlyone of the sensors (MQ-3
sensor), the same effect was observed forall the other sensors, as well as when the Dyson fan
is used in placeof the Honeywell fan. Therefore, for the molecular communication setup
flow based propagation is used.
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sequences. Therefore, the bit1 is modulated with a single spray and the bit 0 with no spray.
Thismodulation scheme, which is called on-off keying, effectivelyminimizes the amount of
chemical used for communicatingEnglish text.
Demodulation:
At the receiver the demodulation is performed by measuring therate of change in
concentration. If during a single bitscommunication session the voltage reading from one of
thesensors is increasing (i.e. the concentration of the chemical signal isincreasing), then the
signal is demodulated as the bit 1. Similarly, ifthe voltage reading from one of the sensors is
decreasing (i.e. theconcentration of the chemical signal is decreasing) the signal
isdemodulated as the bit 0.
Transmitter side:
At the transmitter, the output of the source encoder (i.e. the bitsequence representing
the text message) is concatenated with a twobit sequence 10 at the beginning and the null
characterrepresented by 00000 at the end. The initial 10 indicates startof a text
message and the null character indicates the end of thetext message. For example, if the text
message that is beingtransmitted is the letter A, the output of the source encoder isthe five
bit sequence 11000 (where the left most bit position isthe first bit position), and
transmission bit sequence is101100000000. The transmission bit sequence is then
modulatedusing the scheme discussed in the previous section, where 1 ismodulated with a
spray and 0 with no spray.
Figure 5 representsthe flowchart of the algorithm that runs at the transmitter, andsummarizes
this process.
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Receiver side:
At the receiver, there are two states: the wait state, and thereception state. In the wait
state the receiver uses its sensor tocontinuously monitor the concentration of alcohol. If there
is asudden increase in the concentration of alcohol (i.e. suddenincrease in the sensors voltage
output), the receiver switches to thereception state. This sudden change is caused by the
initial 10bit sequence concatenated to the beginning of every text messagesent by the
transmitter. This sudden change can also be used as thereference time for synchronizing each
bit interval for all the bitsthat would follow. Therefore, no synchronization is
requiredbetween the transmitter and the receiver in advance. Anotherfactor that is taken into
account in this scheme is the propagationdelay[7]. Because the receiver is triggered into
reception state as soonas the leading bit 1 is detected, the time delay caused by
signalspropagation over the separation distance from the transmitter tothe receiver is
incorporated in the reference time[15-20].
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After the receiver enters the reception state, it waits for two bitintervals until the
reception of the initial 10 bit sequence isfinished. The receiver then demodulates and
decodes the receivedsignal 5 bits at a time. During each 5 bit interval, the sourcedecoded
character is displayed to the computer screen using serialport connection. This process
continues until the null characterrepresented by all zero sequence 00000 is detected.
Because thenull character indicates the end of the text message, the receiverwill go back to
the wait state until another text message is sent bythe transmitter. Figure 6 summarizes the
algorithm that isimplemented at the receiver.
17
18
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error rates of 0.01 to 0.03), unreliable (bit error ratesgreater than 0.03). Table1 summarizes
the results.
This transmission rate (one bit per 3 seconds) was chosen. Further the demodulation
anddetection algorithm for this rate are discussed in detail.
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Thedifference between the voltage level (there are 1024 levels in theArduinos 10 bit analog
to digital converter) at the end of a bitinterval and the middle of a bit interval is measured. If
thedifference is greater than 2.2 levels (this threshold is derivedthrough experimentation), the
bit is detected as 1; otherwise the bitis detected as 0.
Using this scheme, the testphrase O CANADA (the name of the national anthem
ofCanada) was successfully sent from the transmitter to the receiver.Figure 8 shows thistest
phrase at the transmitter and received at the receiver.
21
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The first known platform capable oftransmitting short text messages using chemical
signals was developed. The goal to keep the communication protocol and algorithms
simplesuch that other researchers from a wide variety of different fields ofscience could
replicate these results was attained. Moreover, the sensors andequipment were chosen to be
inexpensive and widely available.Another purpose of this platform was to motivate future
research and bridge the gap between theoryand practice.After carefully selecting the
necessary materials for this platform, the overall system response of our setup was analysed.
The linear relationship between flow speedand the delay to system response peaks maximum
was shown. The linear relationship between the flow speed andthe peaks maximum to fullwidth at half max was also shown.
Another major finding was the nonlinearity of this platform.This finding is very
important because most of current communicationtheory is based on linear systems. This
motivates further study on the exact cause of thenonlinearity in future works. If it is shown
that the nonlinearity ispart of practical molecular communication systems (i.e. the
nonlinearity cannot be resolved using better equipment), new communication theoretic work
may be necessary on this topic.
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5.References:
[1] NarimanFarsad et al. , Tabletop Molecular Communication: Text Messages through
Chemical Signals, 2013.
[3]Alberts B, Johnson A, Lewis J, Raff M, Roberts K, et al. (2007) Molecular Biology of the
Cell. Garland Science, 5 edition.
[6]Eckford AW (2007) Nanoscale communication with brownian motion. In: Proc. of 41st
Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems. Baltimore, MD, pp. 160165.
[12] Pedro Sousa ATdA Lino Marques (2008) Volatile marks for robotics guidance. In:
Proceedings of the EURON/IARP International Workshop on Robotics for Risky
Interventions and Surveillance of the Environment. Benicassim, Spain.
[13] Sousa P, Marques L, De Almeida A (2008) Toward chemical-trail following robots. In:
Seventh International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA08). pp.
489494. doi: 10.1109/ICMLA.2008.133.
[14] Munoz L, Dimov N, Carot-Sans G, Bula WP, Guerrero A, et al. (2012) Mimicking
insect communication: Release and detection of pheromone, biosynthesized by an alcohol
acetyl transferase immobilized in a microreactor. PLoS ONE 7: e47751.
[17] Nakano T, Liu JQ (2010) Design and analysis of molecular relay channels: an
information theoretic approach. IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience 9: 213 221.
[20]Farsad N, Eckford AW, Hiyama S, Moritani Y (2011) Quick system design of vesiclebased active transport molecular communication by using a simple transport model. Nano
Communication Networks 2: 175188.
[21]Guney A, Atakan B, Akan OB (2011) Mobile Ad Hoc Nanonetworks with CollisionBasedMolecular Communication. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 11: 353366.
[22]Srinivas KV, Eckford A, Adve R (2012) Molecular communication in fluid media: The
additive inverse gaussian noise channel. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 58: 4678
4692.
(IEEE-
NANO).
Birmingham,
UK,
pp.
15.
doi:10.1109/NANO.2012.6322018.
[24] Kim NR, Chae CB (2012) Novel modulation techniques using isomers as messenger
molecules for molecular communication via diffusion. In: Proc. of 2012 IEEE International
Conference
on
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doi:10.1109/ICC.2012.6364816.
[27] The International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Comittee (CCITT) (1988)
International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2. Blue Book, Fascicle 71. 28. Bochenkov V, Sergee
VG (2010) Sensitivity, selectivity, and stabilityof gassensitive metal-oxide nanostructures.
Metal Oxide Nanostructures and their applications.
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