On the tradeoff between data rate and error probability in discrete microfluidics.

The recent advancements in synthetic biology, and specifically in genetic engineering of bacteria, have enabled the use of bacterial populations to define and design a communication system for nanomachines in biological applications. The need for providing communication strategies in these challenging environments where electromagnetic waves cannot be used, has brought attention of researchers towards molecular communications. In particular, the possibility of moving very small amounts of matter inside microfluidic systems can be exploited to exchange information between micro- and nano-scale devices. Simple modulation techniques such as on-off keying, or alternative strategies such as time-elapse communication (TEC) and following enhancements (e.g. SMART-TEC), have been introduced in microfluidic systems. However, the datarate of these schemes is extremely low, due to the specific microfluidic approach utilized. In this paper we demonstrate that such a low data rate can be improved by several orders of magnitude by exploiting the advantages of both droplet-based microfluidics and bubble-logic. We provide an analytical study of the achievable data rates for molecular communications in discrete microfluidics and evaluate the tradeoff between data rate and error probability.