Improving Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication with Unanchored Enzymes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to enhance diffusion-based molecular communication by adding enzymes that degrade molecules, reducing interference and improving system performance, supported by reaction-diffusion modeling and simulations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel enzyme-based approach to mitigate intersymbol interference in molecular communication, with analytical modeling and simulation validation.

Findings

Enzymes effectively reduce molecule interference in communication channels.

The derived lower bound accurately predicts molecule observations at the receiver.

Simulation results demonstrate improved communication performance with enzymes.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose adding enzymes to the propagation environment of a diffusive molecular communication system as a strategy for mitigating intersymbol interference. The enzymes form reaction intermediates with information molecules and then degrade them so that they have a smaller chance of interfering with future transmissions. We present the reaction-diffusion dynamics of this proposed system and derive a lower bound expression for the expected number of molecules observed at the receiver. We justify a particle-based simulation framework, and present simulation results that show both the accuracy of our expression and the potential for enzymes to improve communication performance.