Information Theoretic Based Comparative Analysis of Different Communication Signals in Plants

This paper compares the information-theoretic aspects of different communication signals in plants. To be specific, we consider two signals responsible for the inter-cellular communication in plants: electro-chemical and mechanosensitive signals. There is a need for a comprehensive comparison of the communication properties of these different signals in plants for different configurations of receiver cells. In this work we address this research problem using molecular communication theory. We compare the mutual information and the information propagation speed for these communication signals. In addition we compare the impact of refractory period on the mutual information and information propagation speed for these signals in plants. The key result of this paper is that, based on the propagation mechanism, better communication performance can be achieved by electro-chemical signals as compared to mechanosensitive signals. We further find that a short refractory period leads to higher mutual information and propagation speeds.