Electromagnetic-Induced Calcium Signal with Network Coding for Molecular Communications

Molecular communication (MC) has become a new communication technology between nano-scale devices due to its biocompatibility and low energy consumption. Calcium signaling gradually becomes a hot research topic as a typical case of molecular communication in biological cells, but the system performance of \(\hbox {Ca}^{2+}\) signal-based molecular communication is low because the intracellular \(\hbox {Ca}^{2+}\) concentration decays with time and space. In this work, we firstly introduce a hybrid communication scheme based on electromagnetic and molecular communication to investigate the mechanism of action of cytoplasmic calcium ions induced by alternating fields. Secondly, the \(\hbox {Ca}^{2+}\) signal is analyzed in a multimodal analysis using an external electromagnetic device that emits electromagnetic waves as a control wave to drive the transmitter. In addition, we propose a network coding scheme based on \(\hbox {Ca}^{2+}\) signal frequency and a high-efficiency communication system with XOR logic gates. The proposed network coding communication system reduces the number of information exchanges and has a higher communication efficiency compared to conventional communication.