Molecular communication (MC) allows nanomachines to communicate and cooperate with each other in a fluid environment. The diffusion-based MC is popular but is easily constrained by the transmit distance due to the severe attenuation of molecule concentrations. In this letter, we present a decode-and-forward (DF) relay strategy for the reversible binding receptor in the diffusion-based MC system. The timevarying spatial distribution of the information molecules based on the reversible association and dissociation between ligand and receptor at the surface of receiver is characterized. An analytical expression for the evaluation of expected error probability is derived, and the key factors impacting on the performance are exploited. Results show that with a constant molecular budget, the proposal can improve the performance significantly, and the performance gain can be enhanced by optimizing the position of the relay node and the number of molecules assigned to the source node. Index Terms-Molecular communication (MC), decode-andforward (DF) relay, reversible binding, ligand-receptor I. INTRODUCTION D IFFUSION-BASED molecular communication (DbMC)is considered as a particularly effective and energyefficient approach of exchanging information among nanomachines [1]. Unlike the active transport and bacterium-based communication, DbMC is a short-to-medium range molecular communication (MC) without external energy and infrastructure. Information molecules are encoded by transmitter propagation to the receiver based on free diffusion in DbMC [2]. During the propagation, however, the attenuation of molecular concentration worsens with the increasing distance. Thus, the reliable communication is challenging for the scenario of long transmit distance.To solve this challenge, one potential solution inherited from the traditional wireless communication is to deploy relay between the transmitter and receiver. There have been several research efforts toward relay-assisted MC [3]-[6]. The design and analysis of repeaters using bacterial has been investigated in [3], an information delivery energy model for MC via bacteria relays is established. In [4] and [5], the authors propose a fixed-gain and variable-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relay strategies. In [6], a decode-and-forward (DF) relay