Joint Nanoscale Communication and Sensing Enabled by Plasmonic Nano-antennas

With the advances in nanotechnology, novel nanosensing technologies can play a pivotal role in today's society. Plasmonic sensing has been proven to provide unprecedented detection reliability and resolution in a very compact form factor. Traditional plasmonic sensors leverage biofunctionalized metallic grating structures whose frequency response in transmission and/or reflection changes according to the presence of targeted biomarkers. However, these sensing setups require the use of bulky measurement equipment to couple light to and from sensors for excitation and detection. In parallel, for over a decade, the nanoscale electromagnetic communication community has been leveraging plasmonic structures to efficiently transmit information at the nanoscale. By combining the two realms, in this paper, the concept of joint nanoscale communication and sensing enabled by plasmonic sensing nano-antennas is proposed. First, the changes in the frequency response of a biofunctionalized plasmonic nano-antenna when exposed to different biomarkers are modeled. Then, a chirp-spread spectrum excitation and detection system is proposed as a way to enable simultaneous communication and sensing at the nanoscale. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.