Signal Transduction for Two-Hop Molecular Communication Networks

In this paper, we consider a two-hop molecular communication relay system, called the relay BIND channel. Based on the cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) model system for signal transduction, our ligand-receptor binding mechanism is modelled as a discrete-time finite state Markov channel. We show how to calculate the mutual information (MI) of the relay BIND channel, for binary finite input alphabets, binary channel state, and binary output. Further, our simulation and analytical results show that the relay BIND channel can improve the molecular communication capacity between two nanomachines using the relay.