Modeling of Viral Aerosol Transmission and Detection

In this paper, we propose studying the disease spread mechanism in the atmosphere as an engineering problem. Aerosol transmission is the most significant mode among the viral transmission mechanisms that do not include physical contact, where airflows carry virus-laden droplets over long distances. Throughout this work, we study the transport of these droplets as a molecular communication problem, where one has no control over the transmission source, but a robust receiver can be designed using bio-sensors. To this end, we present a complete system model and derive an end-to-end mathematical model for the transmission channel under certain constraints and boundary conditions. We derive the system response for both continuous sources such as breathing and jet or impulsive sources such as coughing and sneezing. In addition to transmitter and channel, we assumed a receiver architecture composed of air sampler and Silicon Nanowire field-effect transistor. Then, we formulate a detection problem to maximize the likelihood decision rule and minimize the corresponding missed detection probability. Finally, we present several numerical results to observe the impact of parameters that affect the performance and justify the feasibility of the proposed setup in related applications.