Communication Theoretical Understanding of Intra-Body Nervous Nanonetworks

Emerging nanoscale applications, e.g., nanoscale cooperative intelligent drug delivery or multiple intra-body nanosensors for health monitoring, mandate enabling nanomachines to communicate with each other, and hence, form nanonetworks to overcome the limitations of a single nanomachine. Indeed, the human body is a massive nanoscale molecular communications network composed of billions of interacting nanomachines, i.e., cells, whose functionalities depend on nanoscale molecular communications. In this paper, we first introduce the elementary models for nanoscale neuro-spike communication channels, and discuss its extensions to multi-terminal nervous system nanonetworks. Our objective is to learn from the elegant molecular communication mechanisms inside the human body to engineer practical communication techniques for emerging nanonetworks. Besides, we aim to pave the way for the advancement of revolutionary diagnosis and treatment techniques for neural diseases inspired from information and communication technologies (ICT), which is promising for future neuro-treatment and bio-inspired molecular communication applications.