Modeling and evaluation of BVOCs-mediated plant-to-plant stress signaling: a molecular communication perspective

During plant growth and development, diverse environmental stresses can disrupt normal physiological activities, often leading to growth inhibition or death. Plants release biogenic volatile organic compounds as key mediators to communicate these stress signals to neighboring individuals. However, complex environmental factors—such as meteorological conditions and atmospheric turbulence—markedly affect the atmospheric transport of these compounds. To address the limitations of existing studies, we model the atmospheric dispersion of a single biogenic volatile organic compound species as a single-input single-output molecular communication system, focusing on its instantaneous release under specific wind-speed constraints. By jointly considering plant height, turbulent diffusion, wind speed, and photochemical oxidative degradation, we derive an analytical expression for the received concentration. In this framework, the emitting plant serves as the transmitter, the target plant as the receiver, and the air as the channel. Finally, using numerical simulations and a molecular communication test platform, we systematically conduct transmission performance analysis and evaluate the model through parameter fitting. This research presents a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing inter-plant signaling, laying the theoretical groundwork for intelligent agricultural applications, such as biogenic volatile organic compounds mediated environmental sensing and precision regulation.