  A number of transmission models for airborne pathogens transmission, as
required to understand airborne infectious diseases such as COVID-19, have been
proposed independently from each other, at different scales, and by researchers
from various disciplines. We propose a communication engineering approach that
blends different disciplines such as epidemiology, biology, medicine, and fluid
dynamics. The aim is to present a unified framework using communication
engineering, and to highlight future research directions for modeling the
spread of infectious diseases through airborne transmission. We introduce the
concept of mobile human ad hoc networks (MoHANETs), which exploits the
similarity of airborne transmission-driven human groups with mobile ad hoc
networks and uses molecular communication as the enabling paradigm. In the
MoHANET architecture, a layered structure is employed where the infectious
human emitting pathogen-laden droplets and the exposed human to these droplets
are considered as the transmitter and receiver, respectively. Our
proof-of-concept results, which we validated using empirical COVID-19 data,
clearly demonstrate the ability of our MoHANET architecture to predict the
dynamics of infectious diseases by considering the propagation of
pathogen-laden droplets, their reception and mobility of humans.
