Exploring the impact of ligand residence time on molecular communication system performance

Information reception in artificially synthesized molecular communication (MC) systems ideally follows the mechanisms employed by natural nanosystems to communicate. One of such reception mechanism is the so called ligand-receptor binding. Contemporary research in MC has considerably discussed this mechanism; however, the impact of a crucial parameter associated with the ligand-receptor binding action has not been given appropriate attention in the MC literature. This parameter is termed the residence time, and has played very crucial role in defining for instance, the efficacy of drugs in therapeutic processes; hence, it is critical in the performance of MC. In this paper, we employ biophysical approach to model and discuss the influence of the ligand residence time on the performance of MC systems. The performance metrics considered here are the receiver sensitivity and the intersymbol interference. Numerical results that expose the impact of the residence time on these metrics, and the interrelationships between these metrics in MC system, are discussed.