A simple and scalable receiver model in molecular communication systems

This paper shows a simple although reliable receiver model for diffusion-based molecular communication systems. Indeed, the complexity of molecular communications system, involving a massive number of interacting entities, makes scalability a fundamental property of simulators and modeling tools. A sample scenario is that of targeted drug delivery systems, which makes use of biological nanomachines close to a biological target, able to release molecules in a diseased area. The proposed model tackles the time needed for analyzing such a system by the introduction of an equivalent markovian queuing model, which reproduces the aggregate behavior of thousands of receptors spread over the receiver surface. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach substantially matches simulation results achieved through detailed simulations of a large number of receivers by means of BiNS2 simulator, although the time taken for obtaining the results is order of magnitudes lower than the simulation time. We believe that this model is the precursor of novel models based on similar principles that allow realizing reliable simulations of body-wide systems.