Energy Model for Vesicle-Based Active Transport Molecular Communication

TL;DR

This paper develops an energy model for vesicle-based active transport molecular communication, analyzing how to optimize system parameters for maximum energy efficiency and channel capacity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel energy model for ATMC and provides design guidelines for energy-efficient communication systems based on vesicle size and symbol parameters.

Findings

Optimal vesicle size maximizes rate per unit energy.

Maximizing energy efficiency leads to different system parameters than maximizing rate.

The channel capacity per unit energy can be effectively analyzed and optimized.

Abstract

In active transport molecular communication (ATMC), information particles are actively transported from a transmitter to a receiver using special proteins. Prior work has demonstrated that ATMC can be an attractive and viable solution for on-chip applications. The energy consumption of an ATMC system plays a central role in its design and engineering. In this work, an energy model is presented for ATMC and the model is used to provide guidelines for designing energy efficient systems. The channel capacity per unit energy is analyzed and maximized. It is shown that based on the size of the symbol set and the symbol duration, there is a vesicle size that maximizes rate per unit energy. It is also demonstrated that maximizing rate per unit energy yields very different system parameters compared to maximizing the rate only.