System Modeling of Virus Transmission and Detection in Molecular Communication Channels

Aerosol Transmission is one of the major spread mechanism for diseases and is responsible for transmission of virus over long distances. The advancement in nanotechnology has resulted in sensors and systems that allow us to deal with nanosized biological entities such as virus and bacteria. In this work, the idea of viewing virus transmission through aerosols and their transport as a molecular communication problem is introduced. In such problems one has little or no control over transmission, however, a robust receiver can be designed using nano-biosensors for information extraction. Thus, the objective of this work is to treat viral aerosol spread as a blind communication problem and present a mathematical model for it. Specifically, we study the virus transmission from an engineering perspective and derive an end-to-end mathematical model for virus transmission in the atmosphere. The receiver architecture composed of air sampler and Silicon Nanowire field effect transistor is also discussed. Furthermore, a detection problem is formulated and simulation results are reported that justify the feasibility of such setups in bio-monitoring applications.