Information Theoretic Modeling of Interspecies Molecular Communication

2026-02-07

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of modeling chemical communication in noisy ecological environments influenced by wind speed, distance, and biological response variability. It proposes the first information-theoretic, cross-species molecular communication framework to elucidate how plants convey information to insects via volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The approach treats plant-emitted VOC mixtures as encoded signals and models insect olfactory receptor responses through multiclass probability distributions, integrated with a molecular diffusion channel for numerical simulation. This work systematically quantifies, for the first time, how environmental parameters—such as wind velocity, communication distance, and the number of released molecules—affect channel capacity. By revealing the fundamental characteristics of natural chemical communication channels, the study provides a theoretical foundation for understanding information transfer in ecological interactions.

Technology Category

Multiagent Systems: Agent CommunicationMachine Learning: Information TheoryCognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Neural Spike Coding

Application Category

Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystemsSocial Networks and Social Media: Influence propagation, information diffusion, and the prediction on networksSystems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments

Abstract

Plants and insects communicate using chemical signals like volatile organic compounds (VOCs). A plant encodes information using different blends of VOCs, which propagate through the air to represent different symbolic information. This communication occurs in a noisy environment, characterized by wind, distance, and complex biological reactions. At the receiver, cross-reactive olfactory receptors produce stochastic binding events whose discretized durations form the receiver observation. In this paper, an information-theoretic framework is developed to model interspecies molecular communication (MC), where receptor responses are modeled probabilistically using a multinomial distribution. Numerical results show that the communication depends on environmental parameters such as wind speed, distance, and the number of released molecules. The proposed framework provides fundamental insights into the VOC-based interspecies communication under realistic biological and environmental conditions.

Problem

• interspecies molecular communication
• volatile organic compounds
• information theory
• olfactory receptors
• noisy environment

Innovation

• interspecies molecular communication
• volatile organic compounds
• information-theoretic modeling
• olfactory receptor response
• multinomial distribution