Channel Capacity of Molecular Signaling via Diffusion in Confined Microenvironment

Abstract

To model molecular signal propagation in confined environment. Molecular communication (MC) is rooted in the concepts of understanding, modeling, and engineering information exchange among naturally and artificially synthesized nanosystems. To develop or analyze an MC system, there is the need to model the communication channel through which the molecular signal diffuse, from the transmitter to the receiver. Many models for the diffusion-based MC channel have been proposed in the literature for evaluating the performance of MC systems. Most of the contemporary works assume, and rightly so for some scenarios, that the MC channels under consideration have infinite boundaries. However, this assumption becomes invalid in bounded domains such as the interiors of natural cells and artificially synthesized nanosystems. In this paper, the model of molecular propagation in a confined. microenvironment is employ to explore the effect of such an environment on the MC system. The mutual information of the channel and specifically the closed-form expression of the channel capacity of the molecular signaling in the confined geometry is derive. Numerical results showing the variation in the channel capacity as the function of the channel dimension are presented. Results showed that the channel capacity increases with the decrease in the channel dimension. Subsequently, as the dimension of the channel tends to the nanoscale range typical of many artificially synthesized nanosystems, the effect of the channel width on the capacity and by induction on many other system metrics increases.