μ-NET: A Network for Molecular Biology Applications in Microfluidic Chips

Abstract—This paper introduces -NET, a microfluidic LAN that supports the exchange of both digital information and biochemical information carried by droplets moving across molecular processors in a microfluidic chip. The -NET can be used to support molecular biology applications like DNA, RNA, and protein biosynthesis. The -NET is the first realization of a microfluidic networking paradigm that controls movements of droplets in microfluidic chips by exploiting hydrodynamic phenomena only and builds on recent solutions to achieve communications in the microfluidic domain. The -NET integrates techniques to represent addressing information, as well as switching and medium access control solutions. In fact, in -NET, the address of the molecular processor where a droplet should be sent to is encoded into the distance between droplets; switching is executed to steer the droplets inside the microfluidic device; medium access control is applied to avoid collisions between droplets that may result in their fusion and, thus, loss of the biochemical information. In this paper, the design of -NET is presented in detail, and simulation results validating -NET operations are shown.