Hardware Verification of a Micro-Scale Receiver for Synthetic DNA Molecular Communications

Synthetic molecular communications (SMC), as one of the most promising communication paradigms for nano-networks, is expected to advance many revolutionary areas. Many of the envisioned applications of SMC are in micro-scale. However, the state-of-the-art SMC testbeds reported in the literature are mostly in macro-scale. The lack of micro-scale communication testbeds is its key technology hindrance. To solve this issue, we propose a micro-scale SMC receiver. The proposed micro-scale SMC receiver senses the concentration of information DNA molecules and converts such biological signal into an electric binary signal by electrochemical reaction. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed receiver, experiments are performed and verify that the proposed receiver is capable to successfully receive signals with a bit rate of 0.2 bit/min. This work would help SMC to advance from theoretical research towards practical applications.