Dilara Aktas

Molecular communication (MC), a biologically-inspired technology, enables applications in nanonetworks and the Internet of Everything (IoE), offering unprecedented potential in intra-body systems for applications such as drug delivery, health monitoring, and disease detection. In this paper, we extend our previous research on the Flexure-FET MC receiver by integrating a competitive binding model to enhance its performance in high-interference environments, where multiple species coexist in the reception space. While previous studies have primarily focused on ligand concentration estimation and detection methods, they have not fully addressed the competition between molecular species for receptor binding sites. The competitive binding framework introduced here plays a pivotal role in multitarget environments, closely reflecting real-world biological scenarios. By accounting for the competition between species for receptor binding sites, this framework enhances the understanding of MC dynamics in complex environments. Leveraging this framework enables the fine-tuning of receptor responses, optimizing Flexure-FET MC receiver performance through adjustments in ligand concentrations and receptor affinities. Through comprehensive performance analysis, we demonstrate that integrating competitive binding underscores the importance of accounting for interference in MC systems to improve reliability and accuracy. While the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and symbol error probability (SEP) are impacted by factors such as interferer concentration and receptor dynamics, the framework emphasizes the need to manage these interference factors to optimize the system’s overall performance. The results show that accounting for interference—through competitive binding—provides a more realistic understanding of system behavior and enables the fine-tuning of the receiver’s response, ultimately ensuring more reliable and accurate detection in environments where multiple species are present.

Molecular communication (MC) enables biocompatible and energy-efficient information transfer through chemical signaling, forming a foundational paradigm for emerging applications in the Internet of Nano Things (IoNT) and intrabody healthcare systems. The realization of this vision critically depends on developing advanced receiver architectures that merge nanoscale communication and networking techniques with biocyber interfaces, ensuring energy-efficient, reliable, and low-complexity modulation and detection while maintaining biocompatibility. To address these challenges, the Flexure-FET (flexure sensitive field-effect transistor) MC receiver was introduced as a mechanically transducing design capable of detecting both charged and neutral molecular species. In this study, we present a cylindrical nanowire array–based Flexure-FET MC receiver that enhances design versatility and scalability through distributed electromechanical coupling in a suspended-gate configuration. The proposed array architecture offers additional geometric degrees of freedom, including nanowire radius, length, spacing, and array size, providing a flexible framework that can be tailored to advanced MC scenarios. An analytical end-to-end model is developed to characterize the system’s electromechanical response, noise behavior, and information-theoretic performance, including signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and channel capacity. The results reveal the strong interdependence between geometry, electromechanical dynamics, and molecular binding processes, enabling tunable control over sensitivity, noise characteristics, and communication capacity. The enhanced structural tunability and array configuration of the proposed design provide a flexible foundation for future mixture-based and spatially modulated MC systems, paving the way toward scalable and multifunctional receiver architectures within the IoNT framework.

Humankind mimics the processes and strategies that nature has perfected and uses them as a model to address its problems. This has led to a new communication technology, molecular communication (MC), using molecules to encode, transmit, and receive information. Despite extensive research, an innate MC method found abundantly in nature—olfactory or odor communication—has not been thoroughly studied using information and communication technologies (ICT). Existing studies focus on digitizing this sense and developing actuators without examining odor-based information coding and MC principles, significantly limiting its application potential. Hence, cross-disciplinary research is needed to uncover the fundamentals of this unconventional communication modality from an ICT perspective. The ways of natural odor MC in nature need to be anatomized and engineered for end-to-end communication among humans and human-made things to enable several multi-sense augmented reality technologies reinforced with olfactory senses for novel applications and solutions in the Internet of Everything (IoE). This paper introduces odor-based molecular communication (OMC) and thoroughly examines olfactory systems, exploring odor communication in nature, including odor information, channels, reception, spatial perception, and cognitive functions. Additionally, a comprehensive comparison of various communication systems sets the foundation for further investigation. By highlighting OMC’s unique characteristics, advantages, and potential applications, this paper lays the groundwork for modeling end-to-end OMC channels, designing OMC transmitters and receivers, and developing innovative OMC techniques.

Molecular communication (MC) is one of the emerging technologies enabling nanonetworks and the Internet of Everything (IoE). The practical implementation of the intra-body MC systems is crucial for realizing smart healthcare applications, i.e., drug delivery, early detection, and health monitoring, through communication between nanomachines. A Flexure field-effect transistor (FET) based MC receiver, providing high sensitivity by utilizing nonlinear electromechanical coupling, has recently been proposed. It can also identify neutral molecules, unlike bioFETs. Thus, virus or pathogen detection can be performed with onboard computing by these receivers placed in the Edge. To date, biosensor-based MC receivers have been analyzed only for concentration shift keying (CSK), although weight shift keying (WSK) is a very robust modulation technique. The Flexure-FET-based MC receiver is a great candidate for use in a WSK-based MC system since its transduction mechanism relies on the molecular weight. This work presents the first practical approach to a WSK-based MC system with an improved Flexure-FET-based MC receiver. Its key performance metrics are analyzed from a theoretical MC perspective, also considering biological interference to obtain a more realistic simulation.