Flexure-FET-Based Receiver with Competitive Binding for Interference Mitigation in Molecular Communication

Molecular communication (MC), a biologically inspired technology, enables applications in nanonetworks and the Internet of Everything (IoE), with great potential for intra-body systems such as drug delivery, health monitoring, and disease detection. This paper extends our prior work on the Flexure-FET MC receiver by integrating a competitive binding model to enhance performance in high-interference environments, where multiple molecular species coexist in the reception space. Previous studies have largely focused on ligand concentration estimation and detection, without fully addressing the effects of inter-species competition for receptor binding. Our proposed framework captures this competition, offering a more biologically accurate model for multitarget environments. By incorporating competition dynamics, the model improves understanding of MC behavior under interference. This approach enables fine-tuning of receptor responses by adjusting ligand concentrations and receptor affinities, thereby optimizing the performance of the Flexure-FET MC receiver. Comprehensive analysis shows that accounting for competitive binding is crucial for improving reliability and accuracy in complex MC systems. Factors such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), symbol error probability (SEP), interferer concentration, and receptor dynamics are shown to significantly affect performance. The proposed framework highlights the need to manage these factors effectively. Results demonstrate that modeling interference through competitive binding offers a realistic system perspective and allows tuning of receiver response, enabling robust detection in environments with multiple coexisting species.

Odor-Based Molecular Communications: State-of-the-Art, Vision, Challenges, and Frontier Directions

Humankind mimics the processes and strategies that nature has perfected and uses them as a model to address its problems. That has recently found a new direction, i.e., a novel communication technology called molecular communication (MC), using molecules to encode, transmit, and receive information. Despite extensive research, an innate MC method with plenty of natural instances, i.e., olfactory or odor communication, has not yet been studied with the tools of information and communication technologies (ICT). Existing studies focus on digitizing this sense and developing actuators without inspecting the principles of odor-based information coding and MC, which significantly limits its application potential. Hence, there is a need to focus cross-disciplinary research efforts to reveal the fundamentals of this unconventional communication modality from an ICT perspective. The ways of natural odor MC in nature need to be anatomized and engineered for end-to-end communication among humans and human-made things to enable several multi-sense augmented reality technologies reinforced with olfactory senses for novel applications and solutions in the Internet of Everything (IoE). This paper introduces the concept of odor-based molecular communication (OMC) and provides a comprehensive examination of olfactory systems. It explores odor communication in nature, including aspects of odor information, channels, reception, spatial perception, and cognitive functions. Additionally, a comprehensive comparison of various communication systems sets the foundation for further investigation. By highlighting the unique characteristics, advantages, and potential applications of OMC through this comparative analysis, the paper lays the groundwork for exploring the modeling of an end-to-end OMC channel, considering the design of OMC transmitters and receivers, and developing innovative OMC techniques.