  In this paper, we propose studying the disease spread mechanism in the
atmosphere as an engineering problem. Aerosol transmission is the most
significant mode among the viral transmission mechanisms that do not include
physical contact, where airflows carry virus-laden droplets over long
distances. Throughout this work, we study the transport of these droplets as a
molecular communication problem, where one has no control over the transmission
source, but a robust receiver can be designed using bio-sensors. To this end,
we present a complete system model and derive an end-to-end mathematical model
for the transmission channel under certain constraints and boundary conditions.
We derive the system response for both continuous sources such as breathing and
jet or impulsive sources such as coughing and sneezing. In addition to
transmitter and channel, we assumed a receiver architecture composed of air
sampler and Silicon Nanowire field-effect transistor. Then, we formulate a
detection problem to maximize the likelihood decision rule and minimize the
corresponding missed detection probability. Finally, we present several
numerical results to observe the impact of parameters that affect the
performance and justify the feasibility of the proposed setup in related
applications.
