Paper at IEEE NANO: Brownian motion versus motors for molecular communication

IEEE NANO is happening this week, and I have a paper:

A. W. Eckford, N. Farsad, S. Hiyama, and Y. Moritani, “Microchannel molecular communication with nanoscale carriers: Brownian motion versus active transport,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Nanotechnology, Seoul, Korea, 2010. [PDF] [Poster PDF]

Building on my earlier molecular communication work, this paper looks at communication in microchannels, like you would find in a lab-on-chip device. In these devices, molecules can propagate either randomly by Brownian motion, or by piggy-backing on a molecular motor. We compared the information rates achievable by each, and found two distinct regimes where each method works best. When the number of information-bearing molecules is small, motors are superior, since their motion is much less random than Brownian motion. However, for large numbers of molecules, Brownian motion is best, because all the molecules can start propagating immediately, rather than waiting for a motor to pick them up.

This was joint work with my Ph.D. student, Nariman Farsad, as well as Satoshi Hiyama and Yuki Moritani from NTT DOCOMO. Nariman is presenting the paper.