2020/04/30 by Alexandros–Apostolos A. Boulogeorgos, Boulogeorgos, Alexandros-Apostolos A., Stylianos E. Trevlakis +3
Engineering · Neuroscience · #FOS: Electrical engineering #Molecular Communication and Nanonetworks #Neuroscience and Neural Engineering #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #Wireless Body Area Networks #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.00405
openalex publication_date 2020/04/30 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This article discusses the fundamental architectures for optical wireless\nsystems for biomedical applications. After summarizing the main applications\nand reporting their requirements, we describe the characteristics of the\ntransdermal and in-body optical channels as well as the challenges that they\nimpose in the design of communication systems. In more detail, we provide\nthree possible architectures for transdermal communications, namely\nelectro-optical (EO) monitoring, opto-electrical (OE), and all-optical (AO) for\nneural stimulation, which are currently under investigation, whereas for\nin-body communications, we provide a nano-scale AO (NAO) concept. For each\narchitecture, we discuss the main operation principles, the technology\nenablers, and research directions for their development. Finally, we highlight\nthe necessity of designing an information-theoretic framework for the analysis\nand design of the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers, which\ntakes into account the channels'~characteristics.\n