Capacity of a Simple Intercellular Signal Transduction Channel

TL;DR

This paper models a ligand-receptor molecular communication channel using a Markov process, deriving its capacity and revealing that feedback does not enhance capacity, with the optimal input being independent and identically distributed.

Contribution

It provides a novel capacity analysis for a simple intercellular signaling channel modeled as a Markov process, showing feedback's non-beneficial role.

Findings

Capacity can be explicitly calculated for the model.

The optimal input distribution is iid.

Feedback does not increase channel capacity.

Abstract

We model the ligand-receptor molecular communication channel with a discrete-time Markov model, and show how to obtain the capacity of this channel. We show that the capacity-achieving input distribution is iid; further, unusually for a channel with memory, we show that feedback does not increase the capacity of this channel.