Infectious diseases spread via pathogens such as viruses and bacteria. Airborne pathogen transmission via droplets is an important mode for infectious diseases. In this paper, the spreading mechanism of infectious diseases by airborne pathogen transmission between two humans is modeled with a molecular communication perspective. An end-to-end system model which considers the pathogen-laden cough/sneeze droplets as the input and the infection state of the human as the output is proposed. This model uses the gravity, initial velocity and buoyancy for the propagation of droplets and a receiver model which considers the central part of the human face as the reception interface is proposed. Furthermore, the probability of infection for an uninfected human is derived by modeling the number of propagating droplets as a random process. The numerical results reveal that exposure time affects the probability of infection. In addition, the social distance for a horizontal cough should be at least 1.7 m and the safe coughing angle of a coughing human to infect less people should be less than −25 • .

Many species, from single-cell bacteria to advanced animals, use molecular communication (MC) to share information with each other via chemical signals. Although MC is mostly studied in microscale, new practical applications emerge in macroscale. It is essential to derive an estimation method for channel parameters such as distance for practical macroscale MC systems which include a sprayer emitting molecules as a transmitter (TX) and a sensor as the receiver (RX). In this paper, a novel approach based on fluid dynamics is proposed for the derivation of the distance estimation in practical MC systems.According to this approach, transmitted molecules are considered as moving droplets in the MC channel.With this approach, the Fluid Dynamics-Based Distance Estimation (FDDE) algorithm which predicts the propagation distance of the transmitted droplets by updating the diameter of evaporating droplets at each time step is proposed. FDDE algorithm is validated by experimental data. The results reveal that the distance can be estimated by the fluid dynamics approach which introduces novel parameters such as the volume fraction of droplets in a mixture of air and liquid droplets and the beamwidth of the TX.Furthermore, the effect of the evaporation is shown with the numerical results.

Secure communication is critical in wireless networks as the networks are prone to eavesdropping from unintended nodes. To address this challenge, physical layer security (PLS) is being employed to combat information leakage. In this paper, we present the performance evaluations based on the secrecy rate and the secrecy outage probability for multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications by employing hybrid beamforming (HBF) at the base station, legitimate users and eavesdropper. Using a 3-dimensional mmWave channel model and uniform planar antenna arrays (UPA), we employ artificial noise (AN) beamforming to jam the channels of eavesdropper and to enhance the secrecy rate. The transmitter uses the minimum mean square error (MMSE) precoder to mitigate multiuser interference for the secure MIMO mmWave systems. It is shown that the overall system performance highly depends on the power allocation factor between AN and the signal of legitimate users.

In this article, a novel droplet-based signal reconstruction (SR) approach to channel modeling, which considers liquid droplets as information carriers instead of molecules in the molecular communication (MC) channel, is proposed for practical sprayer-based macroscale MC systems. These practical MC systems are significant, since they can be used in order to investigate airborne pathogen transmission with biological sensors due to the similar mechanisms of sneezing/coughing and sprayer. Our proposed approach takes a two-phase flow which is generated by the interaction of droplets in liquid phase with air molecules in gas phase into account. Two-phase flow is combined with the SR of the receiver (RX) to propose a channel model. The SR part of the model quantifies how the accuracy of the sensed molecular signal in its reception volume depends on the sensitivity response of the RX and the adhesion/detachment process of droplets. The proposed channel model is validated by employing experimental data.

Molecular communication (MC) is an important nanoscale communication paradigm, which is employed for the interconnection of the nanomachines (NMs) to form nanonetworks. A transmitter NM (TN) sends the information symbols by emitting molecules into the transmission medium and a receiver NM (RN) receives the information symbols by sensing the molecule concentration.In this paper, a model of how an RN measures and reconstructs the molecular signal is proposed. The signal around the RN is assumed to be a Gaussian random process instead of the less realistic deterministic approach. After the reconstructed signal is derived as a doubly stochastic poisson process, the distortion between the signal around the RN and the reconstructed signal is derived as a new performance parameter in MC systems. The derived distortion, which is a function of system parameters such as RN radius, sampling period, and the diffusion coefficient of the channel, is shown to be valid by employing random walk simulations. Then, it is shown that the original signal can be satisfactorily reconstructed with a sufficiently low level of distortion. Finally, optimum RN design parameters, namely, RN radius, sampling period, and sampling frequency, are derived by minimizing the signal distortion. The simulation results reveal that there is a trade-off among the RN design parameters which can be jointly set for a desired signal distortion.Trans Emerging Tel Tech. 2019;30:e3699.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ett