Designing Molecular Circuits for Approximate Maximum a Posteriori Demodulation of Concentration Modulated Signals

• Published in: IEEE transactions on communications 2019-08, Vol.67 (8), p.5458-5473
• Main Author: Chou, Chun Tung
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: analog computation; Approximation; Chemical reactions; Chemicals; Circuit design; Computer simulation; Data processing; Demodulation; Demodulators; Differential equations; History; Integrated circuit modeling; Markov processes; Mathematical analysis; Mathematical model; maximum a posteriori; molecular circuits; Molecular communication (telecommunication); Molecular communications; molecular computation; Ordinary differential equations; Organic chemistry; Receivers; Yeast
• ISSN: 0090-6778; 1558-0857
• DOI: 10.1109/TCOMM.2019.2913864

Motivated by the fact that living cells use molecular circuits (i.e., a set of chemical reactions) for information processing, this paper investigates the problem of designing molecular circuits for demodulation. In our earlier work, we use a Markovian approach to derive a demodulator for diffusion-based molecular communication. The demodulation filters take the form of an ordinary differential equation, which computes the log-posteriori probability of a transmission symbol being sent. This paper considers the realization of these demodulation filters using molecular circuits assuming the transmission symbols are rectangular pulses of the same duration but different amplitudes, i.e., concentration modulation. This paper makes a number of contributions. First, we use time-scale separation and renewal theory to analytically derive an approximation of the demodulation filter from our earlier work. Second, we present a method to turn this approximation into a molecular circuit. By using simulations, we show that the output of the derived molecular circuit is approximately equal to the log-posteriori probability calculated by the exact demodulation filter if the log-posteriori probability is positive. Third, we demonstrate that a biochemical circuit in yeast behaves similarly to the derived molecular demodulation filter and is therefore a candidate for implementing the derived filter.