  The prospect of new biological and industrial applications that require
communication in micro-scale, encourages research on the design of
bio-compatible communication networks using networking primitives already
available in nature. One of the most promising candidates for constructing such
networks is to adapt and engineer specific types of bacteria that are capable
of sensing, actuation, and above all, communication with each other. In this
paper, we describe a new architecture for networks of bacteria to form a data
collecting network, as in traditional sensor networks. The key to this
architecture is the fact that the node in the network itself is a bacterial
colony; as an individual bacterium (biological agent) is a tiny unreliable
element with limited capabilities. We describe such a network under two
different scenarios. We study the data gathering (sensing and multihop
communication) scenario as in sensor networks followed by the consensus problem
in a multi-node network. We will explain as to how the bacteria in the colony
collectively orchestrate their actions as a node to perform sensing and
relaying tasks that would not be possible (at least reliably) by an individual
bacterium. Each single bacterium in the colony forms a belief by sensing
external parameter (e.g., a molecular signal from another node) from the medium
and shares its belief with other bacteria in the colony. Then, after some
interactions, all the bacteria in the colony form a common belief and act as a
single node. We will model the reception process of each individual bacteria
and will study its impact on the overall functionality of a node. We will
present results on the reliability of the multihop communication for data
gathering scenario as well as the speed of convergence in the consensus
scenario.
