Performance Analysis of Reversible Binding Receptor Based Decode-and-Forward Relay in Molecular Communication Systems

Abstract

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

Message exchange dynamics in wireless biological nanonetworks

“…In the works of previous studies, 17,18 the authors investigate a relaying scheme for 3d multihop MC via diffusion where the communication parts use either different or the same type of molecules in each hop. Concerning the hop strategy, there are two different options, one with the decode and forward option [19][20][21] and one with the amplify and forward. For the second type in an earlier work, 22 the authors studied the effect of different amplification factors where in Yuan et al, 21 different signal detection schemes were compared.…”

“…Concerning the hop strategy, there are two different options, one with the decode and forward option [19][20][21] and one with the amplify and forward. For the second type in an earlier work, 22 the authors studied the effect of different amplification factors where in Yuan et al, 21 different signal detection schemes were compared. In Yang et al, 23 a generalized multihop MC model was developed and investigated the effect of the additional relay nodes.…”

On the Reception Process of Molecular Communication-Based Drug Delivery

“…Note that in the model proposed in [21], no limitation is considered for the number of the receptors. In [22], the binding and unbinding rates of the ligand-receptor are also considered, and the number of received ligands is modeled using the Poisson distribution. In [13], it is assumed that the number of the receptors is finite.…”

“…The maximum number of molecules that can be placed in the reception space equals N m , as mentioned before. According to this issue, and also according to (22), the upper bound for the transmission of drug molecules is obtained as below:…”

Quick Macroscopic Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication With Wavelike Propagation by Use of a Suspension of Relay Cells

“…However, for extending the range of data transmission in channels with high attenuation and/or distortion, relays are commonly used. In MC, too, this approach has been adopted and investigated [27], [28]: diffusion-based 2-hop processes, i. e., with a single relay between transmitter and receiver in the 1- [29], [30], 2-[31] and 3-dimensional space [32], [33], have been presented, where both a mere amplification of the received signal (amplify-and-forward) and a decoding and subsequent encoding of the reconstructed message (decode-and-forward) were considered. Also the effect of an additional drift component was studied in [34]- [37].…”