Concepts

Scope

cell.dev is intended to provide a functional point-to-point and system-to-system protocol between microcellular devices, as well as external computers that may interact with them.

There are three main targets that devices implementing cell.dev will interact with:

  • Microcellular Devices (MDs) refer to the microchips that are implanted within the cells themselves
  • Microcellular Networks (MNs) are peer-to-peer networks of MDs that are grouped together for some common purpose. For instance, a network overseeing aspects of immune response might network together dendritic cells and T cells.
  • External Devices refer to any outside computer that wants to communicate with an MD or MN. For instance, a laptop might push an over-the-air firmware update.

The term Device, in general, refers to any of the above.

The terms cell, cellular, and cellular networks refer to biological cells and networks between these biological cells. Unless otherwise stated, they do not refer to and are not to be confused with their equivalents in mobile telephony.

Operation

cell.dev implements four basic functions: The Basic Interface, code division, addressing, and peer-to-peer control for MNs.

Basic Interface

All MDs and MNs implementing cell.dev must implement the Basic Interface which provides a standard set of API calls between such devices for manipulating and getting data about basic cellular functions. Providing a standard API in this matter promotes compatibility between different products and can be used as a backstop in case devices are rejected by each other or the organism they are inside of.

Code Division

A major risk to the development of these microcellular devices is the lack of available bandwidth to talk between what could be thousands or millions of devices. To address this issue, cell.io borrows the concept of Code Division from mobile telephony. In this arrangement, a single band of communication can be split between many participants in a network by dedicating a part of each transmission to one device.

Addressing

Each device implementing cell.io is assigned a unique Individual Device Identifier, or IDI, which shall be an ISO/IEC 9834-8:2014 Universal Unique Identifier. This ensures there will always be enough available identifiers for any sized implementation.

An example IDI: 44a08e21-f54d-43f8-85f8-02ed9a9ddc85

Peer-to-peer Control

To prevent single-point-of-failure issues, Microcellular Networks are composed on the basis of peer-to-peer control. That means that there is not one central device that is responsible for the operation of the entire network, but rather each member controls only its own operation.