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Artificial chemical communication is an emerging field of study driven by the need of exchanging information in delicate environments where standard procedures based on electromagnetic waves cannot be used. A non-synchronized artificial chemical communication system, based on a new modulation technique, namely reaction shift keying (RSK), is presented. The RSK implies that the quenchers are injected into the transmitter, the chemical messenger reacts and a chemically modified messenger travels towards the receiver. Encoding of "0" is obtained by means of the emission of a messenger that reaches the receiver once chemically modified. To encode the value "1", the messenger is not subjected to chemical reaction. Fluorescent carbon nanoparticle molecular messengers that exploit the reaction with Cu(ii) ions for signal modulation were synthesized. A prototypal RSK modulated chemical communication system is developed, from simulations of the communication platform to an operating prototypal system.

Molecular communication exploits functional molecular systems travelling along fluid media to deliver messages encoded as concentration pulses, e.g. molecular bits. As the bits are naturally broadened by diffusion, limiting the distance along which information can be transferred, by careful design and optimization of the molecular messengers, is required. A new paradigm, exploiting the chemical reactivity of a suitable molecular messenger, has been developed to achieve long range information transfer with variable transmitter-receiver distances. The experimental results and theoretical simulations, carried out by using fluorescent molecules switched by pH-driven hydrolysis, are reported here. In particular, we simulated the information transport process by using numerical solutions of differential equations governing information swapping and we show that by exploiting the reactivity of the chemical messenger, a stable signal at the receiver is maintained within a wide range of distance. This theoretical prediction was fully experimentally verified by using a prototypal molecular communication platform.