The design and engineering of molecular communication (MC) components capable of processing chemical concentration signals is the key to unleashing the potential of MC for interdisciplinary applications. By controlling the signaling pathway and molecule exchange between cell devices, synthetic biology provides the MC community with tools and techniques to achieve various signal processing functions. In this paper, we propose a design framework to realize any order concentration shift keying (CSK) systems based on simple and reusable single-input single-output cells. The design framework also exploits the distributed multicellular consortia with spatial segregation, which has advantages in system scalability, low genetic manipulation, and signal orthogonality. We also create a small library of reusable engineered cells and apply them to implement binary CSK (BCSK) and quadruple CSK (QCSK) systems to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed design framework. Importantly, we establish a mathematical framework to theoretically characterize our proposed distributed multicellular systems. Specially, we divide a system into fundamental building blocks, from which we derive the impulse response of each block and the cascade of the impulse responses leads to the end-to-end response of the system. Simulation results obtained from the agent-based simulator BSim not only validate our CSK design framework but also demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed mathematical analysis.

翻译：分子通信（MC）组件能够处理化学浓度信号的设计与工程化，是释放MC在跨学科应用中潜力的关键。通过控制细胞装置间的信号通路和分子交换，合成生物学为MC社区提供了实现多种信号处理功能的工具与技术。本文提出一种基于简单可复用的单输入单输出细胞、实现任意阶浓度移位键控（CSK）系统的设计框架。该框架利用具有空间分离特性的分布式多细胞联合体，在系统可扩展性、低遗传操作需求及信号正交性方面具有优势。我们构建了小型可复用工程细胞库，并将其应用于二进制CSK（BCSK）和四进制CSK（QCSK）系统的实现，验证了所提设计框架的可行性。重要的是，我们建立了数学框架以理论表征所提出的分布式多细胞系统。具体而言，将系统分解为基本构建模块，推导每个模块的脉冲响应，并通过脉冲响应的级联获得系统的端到端响应。基于智能体仿真器BSim的仿真结果不仅验证了CSK设计框架，还证明了所提数学分析的准确性。