Definition
Tiny volumes of fluids, so-called droplets, are used for communication and/or networking purposes in microfluidic chips.
Historical Background
Communications in microfluidic channels is a type of molecular communication. In Bicen and Akyildiz (2014), the transport of molecules that are dispersed into a continuous fluid in a microfluidic channel has been investigated. In droplet-based microfluidics, droplets flow in microfluidic channels inside an immiscible continuous flow. The droplets can be independently controlled and manipulated, paving the way for communications, computing, and networking in microfluidic chips.
Droplet-Based Communications
The idea of encoding/decoding of information using droplets has been, for the first time, introduced in Fuerstman et al. (2007). In particular, the distance between two droplets has been used for information encoding, and experimental results have been...
References
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Haselmayr, W., Zanella, A., Morabito, G. (2019). Communications and Networking in Droplet-Based Microfluidic Systems. In: Shen, X., Lin, X., Zhang, K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Wireless Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32903-1_313-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32903-1_313-1
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