Analysis of MC Systems Employing Receivers Covered by Heterogeneous Receptors

This paper investigates the channel impulse response (CIR), i.e., the molecule hitting rate, of a molecular communication (MC) system employing an absorbing receiver (RX) covered by multiple non-overlapping receptors. In this system, receptors are heterogeneous, i.e., they may have different sizes and arbitrary locations. Furthermore, we consider two types of transmitter (TX), namely a point TX and a membrane fusion (MF)-based spherical TX. We assume the point TX or the center of the MF-based TX has a fixed distance to the center of the RX. Given this fixed distance, the TX can be at different locations and the CIR of the RX depends on the exact location of the TX. By averaging over all possible TX locations, we analyze the expected molecule hitting rate at the RX as a function of the sizes and locations of the receptors, where we assume molecule degradation may occur during the propagation of the signaling molecules. Notably, our analysis is valid for different numbers, a wide range of sizes, and arbitrary locations of the receptors, and its accuracy is confirmed via particle-based simulations. Exploiting our numerical results, we show that the expected number of absorbed molecules at the RX increases with the number of receptors, when the total area on the RX surface covered by receptors is fixed. Based on the derived analytical expressions, we compare different geometric receptor distributions by examining the expected number of absorbed molecules at the RX. We show that evenly distributed receptors result in a larger number of absorbed molecules than other distributions. We further compare three models that combine different types of TXs and RXs. Compared to the ideal model with a point TX and a fully absorbing RX, the practical model with an MF-based TX and an RX with heterogeneous receptors yields a lower peak CIR, suffers from more severe inter-symbol interference, and gives rise to a higher average bit error rate (BER). This underlines the importance of our analysis of practical TX-RX models since the existing CIR and BER analyses based on the ideal model do not reflect the performance achievable in practice. Numerical results show that different vesicle generation rate results in the same number of molecules harvested by the TX, but a different peak received signal at the RX.