Improving Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication with Unanchored 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.

15 pages, 4 figures, presented at the 7th International Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONETICS 2012) in Lugano, Switzerland