Interfacing Biological and Wireless Systems

Over the last decade, wireless communication networks have achieved many major successes and emerged as the key technology for enabling ubiquitous access to information. However, several challenges remain, energy-efficiency being one of the most notable. At the same time, biological systems are well known to be extremely energy efficient. From the brain that performs outstandingly complex tasks with only few tens of watts, to the ear that can carry the equivalent of a billion floating-point operations per second, biological systems are many orders of magnitude more efficient than our state of the art wireless systems. A natural, although clearly challenging, question is if we can build biologicallyenabled wireless networks. This quantum leap in efficiency would be analogous to the improvements from Pascalʼs mechanical calculators to electronic digital computers. We argue that recent advances in bio-engineering technology, and synthetic-biology will dramatically expand the frontier of wireless communication research. An example of system that can benefit from such research is a wireless sensor network. Most wireless sensor nodes rely on a periodic wakeup to be paged for requests. This results in significant energy consumption and increased delay. A Bio-enabled Sensor Network composed of a nano-power sensing device that can go in a full sleep mode but can still be woken up using a fairly long-range RF signal could solve this problem. The idea is to transduce a weak ElectroMagnetic (EM) signal into biological signals and use a biological device to demodulate the information embedded in the original EM signal.