"Information-friction" and its impact on minimum energy per communicated bit

Just as there are frictional losses associated with moving masses on a surface, what if there are frictional losses associated with moving information on a substrate? We propose to model these losses as proportional to “bit-meters,” i.e., the product of mass of information (i.e., its entropy) and the distance of information transport. For communication across a binary input AWGN channel, by obtaining unavoidable lower bounds on bit-meters for decoding computation, we arrive at limits on energy consumption in decoding under this model. Using these lower bounds we show that the total (transmit + decoding) energy-per-bit must diverge to infinity as the target error probability is lowered.