Capacity of Ligand Receptor Channel with Markovian Symbol Detection

Stochastic representation of ligand receptor binding is important to provide a receiver modeling of the molecular communication system. In this paper, we model the binding of a finite number of ligand receptors on the receiver with discrete time Markov chains. A novel Markov chain model is introduced for the final output which considers the combined effect of responses received on each ligand receptor. Moreover, the maximum rate at which the proposed chemical binding can operate is presented by analytically quantifying the discrete time capacity of the ligand channel for a binary source. The derived capacity analysis clearly articulates the advantage obtained by employing multiple receptors over a single receptor in a biological signaling scenario with a threshold detector giving the final output.