Advancements made in microano technologies for interfacing, controlling, and manipulating biology show the potential of exploiting the functionalities of biological organisms for designing and engineering communication systems and networks. For example, the human nervous system, which consists of several billion neurons located in the brain, the spinal cord, and within nerves throughout the body, truly forms an electrochemical computation and communication network at the nanoscale. A remarkable aspect of the nervous system is its capability to process a huge amount of information coming from both outside and inside the body, encoded as sequences of electrochemical spikes, or action potentials. Another example is given by signaling pathways, where information is propagated among cells through molecule exchange, at the basis of major cellular functionalities such as cell growth, differentiation, homeostasis, and tissue formation. A vast amount of applications, ranging from medical status monitoring to targeted drug delivery, can potentially stem from novel technologies to exploit the aforementioned biological functionalities, and their development poses numerous theoretical and practical challenges. This special issue is dedicated to the modeling, simulation, communication and information-theoretic study, network analysis, signal processing, and application-specific design of biological systems for communications.
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