"Information-Friction" and its implications on minimum energy required for communication

Abstract: Just as there are frictional losses associated with moving masses on a surface, what if there were frictional losses associated with moving information on a substrate? Indeed, many modes of communication suffer from such frictional losses. We propose to model these losses as proportional to "bit-meters," i.e., the product of mass of information (i.e., the number of bits) and the distance of information transport. We use this "information- friction" model to understand fundamental energy requirements on encoding and decoding in communication circuitry. First, for communication across a binary input AWGN channel, we arrive at fundamental limits on bit-meters (and thus energy consumption) for decoding implementations that have a predetermined input-independent length of messages. For encoding, we relax the fixed-length assumption and derive bounds for flexible-message- length implementations. Using these lower bounds we show that the total (transmit + encoding + decoding) energy-per-bit must diverge to infinity as the target error probability is lowered to zero. Further, the closer the communication rate is maintained to the channel capacity (as the target error-probability is lowered to zero), the faster the required decoding energy diverges to infinity.