Capacity Evaluation of a Quantum-Based Channel in a Biological Context

A much shorter version of this work has been accepted to Proc. of ACM NANOCOM 2016, New York City, New York, USA, September 28-30, 2016.; International audience; Nanotechnology, as enabler of the miniaturization of devices in a scale ranging from 1 to few hundreds of nm, represents a viable solution for " alternative " communication paradigms that could be effective in complex networked systems, as body area networks. Traditional communication paradigms are not effective in the context of joint body and nano-networked systems, for several reasons, and then novel approaches have been investigated such as nanomechanical, electromagnetic, acoustic, molecular, etc. On the other hand, quantum phenomena represent a natural direction for developing nanotechnology, since it has to be considered as a new scale where new phenomena can occur and can be exploited for information purpose. Specific quantum particles are phonons, the quanta of mechanical vibrations (i.e., acoustic excitations), that can be analyzed as potential information carriers in a body networked context. In this paper we will focus on the generation of phonons from photon-phonon interaction, by irradiating a sample of human tissue with an electromagnetic field, and then we will theoretically derive the information capacity and the bit rate in the frequency range [10$^3$ − 10$^12$ ] Hz.