TY - GEN
T1 - Capacity of bacterial cables via Electron-transfer under full-CSI
AU - Michelusi, Nicolò
AU - Mitra, Urbashi
N1 - Funding Information:
This research has been funded in part by the following grants: ONR N00014-09-1-0700, AFOSR FA9550-12-1-0215, DOT CA-26-7084-00, NSF CCF-1117896, NSF CNS-1213128, NSF CCF-1410009, NSF CPS-1446901.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 IEEE.
PY - 2015/9/28
Y1 - 2015/9/28
N2 - Recent discoveries of bacterial cables that transfer electrons across centimeter-length scales motivate the study of their information capacity. The bacterial cable is modeled as an electron queue that transfers electrons from the encoder at the electron donor source to the decoder at the electron acceptor sink. The model allows to capture the coupling between the electron signal and the energetic state of the cells via clogging due to local ATP saturation along the cable. Based on the analysis of a discrete-time scheme with asymptotically small time-slot duration, and assuming full causal channel state information (CSI), the optimality of binary input distributions is proved, i.e., the encoder transmits at either maximum or minimum intensity, as dictated by the physical constraints of the cable. It is proved that the optimal binary signal can be determined via dynamic programming, and that it has smaller intensity than that given by the myopic policy, which greedily maximizes the instantaneous information rate but neglects its effect on the steady-state distribution of the cable. This work represents a first contribution towards the design of electron signaling schemes in more complex microbial systems, e.g., biofilms, where the tension between maximizing the transfer of information and guaranteeing the well-being of the overall bacterial community arises, and motivates further research on the design of more practical schemes, where CSI is only partially available.
AB - Recent discoveries of bacterial cables that transfer electrons across centimeter-length scales motivate the study of their information capacity. The bacterial cable is modeled as an electron queue that transfers electrons from the encoder at the electron donor source to the decoder at the electron acceptor sink. The model allows to capture the coupling between the electron signal and the energetic state of the cells via clogging due to local ATP saturation along the cable. Based on the analysis of a discrete-time scheme with asymptotically small time-slot duration, and assuming full causal channel state information (CSI), the optimality of binary input distributions is proved, i.e., the encoder transmits at either maximum or minimum intensity, as dictated by the physical constraints of the cable. It is proved that the optimal binary signal can be determined via dynamic programming, and that it has smaller intensity than that given by the myopic policy, which greedily maximizes the instantaneous information rate but neglects its effect on the steady-state distribution of the cable. This work represents a first contribution towards the design of electron signaling schemes in more complex microbial systems, e.g., biofilms, where the tension between maximizing the transfer of information and guaranteeing the well-being of the overall bacterial community arises, and motivates further research on the design of more practical schemes, where CSI is only partially available.
KW - Markov channels
KW - bacterial communication
KW - electron transfer
KW - poisson channels
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U2 - 10.1109/ISIT.2015.7282671
DO - 10.1109/ISIT.2015.7282671
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84969847335
T3 - IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings
SP - 1327
EP - 1331
BT - Proceedings - 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2015
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2015
Y2 - 14 June 2015 through 19 June 2015
ER -