Enzymatic cycle-based receivers for approximate maximum a posteriori demodulation of concentration modulated signals

TL;DR

This paper proposes enzymatic cycle-based receivers for molecular communication that approximate MAP demodulation, improving bit-error rates by tuning enzymatic parameters, and introduces a novel bio-inspired approach not previously explored.

Contribution

It introduces a new enzymatic cycle-based receiver design for molecular communication that approximates MAP demodulation, a feature not present in existing literature.

Findings

Enzymatic cycle parameters significantly affect demodulation performance.

Proper parameter tuning reduces bit-error ratio.

Simulation confirms the effectiveness of enzymatic cycles in MAP approximation.

Abstract

Molecular communication is a bio-inspired communication paradigm where molecules are used as the information carrier. This paper considers a molecular communication network where the transmitter uses concentration modulated signals for communication. Our focus is to design receivers that can demodulate these signals. We want the receivers to use enzymatic cycles as their building blocks and can work approximately as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) demodulator. No receivers with all these features exist in the current molecular communication literature. We consider enzymatic cycles because they are a very common class of chemical reactions that are found in living cells. In addition, a MAP receiver has good statistical performance. In this paper, we study the operating regime of an enzymatic cycle and how the parameters of the enzymatic cycles can be chosen so that the receiver can approximately implement a MAP demodulator. We use simulation to study the performance of this receiver. We show that we can reduce the bit-error ratio of the demodulator if the enzymatic cycle operates in specific parameter regimes.