Molecular communication is a bio-inspired communication paradigm where molecules are used as the information carrier. This paper considers a molecular communication network where the transmitter uses concentration modulated signals for communication. Our focus is to design receivers that can demodulate these signals. We impose three features on our receivers. We want the receivers to use enzymatic cycles as their building blocks, have high input impedance and can work approximately as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) demodulator. No receivers with all these three features exist in the current molecular communication literature. We consider enzymatic cycles because they are a very common class of chemical reactions that are found in living cells. Since a receiver is to be placed in the communication environment, it should ideally have a high input impedance so that it has minimal impact on the environment and on other receivers. Lastly, a MAP receiver has good statistical performance. In this paper, we show how we can use time-scale separation to make an enzymatic cycle to have high input impedance and how the parameters of the enzymatic cycles can be chosen so that the receiver can approximately implement a MAP demodulator. We use simulation to study the performance of this receiver. In particular, we consider an environment with multiple receivers and show that a receiver has little impact on the bit error ratio of a nearby receiver because they have high input impedance.

翻译：分子通信是一种受生物学启发的通信范式，其中分子被用作信息载体。本文考虑一个分子通信网络，其中发射器使用浓度调制信号进行通信。我们的重点是设计能够解调这些信号的接收器。我们为接收器设定了三个特性：希望接收器使用酶循环作为其基本构建模块，具有高输入阻抗，并能够近似实现最大后验（MAP）解调器。目前分子通信文献中尚未存在同时具备这三个特性的接收器。我们选择酶循环是因为它们是活细胞中非常常见的一类化学反应。由于接收器将被放置在通信环境中，理想情况下它应具有高输入阻抗，以最大限度地减少对环境和其它接收器的影响。最后，MAP接收器具有良好的统计性能。本文展示了如何通过时间尺度分离使酶循环具有高输入阻抗，以及如何选择酶循环的参数，使得接收器能够近似实现MAP解调器。我们通过仿真研究该接收器的性能。特别地，我们考虑了一个包含多个接收器的环境，并表明由于接收器具有高输入阻抗，其对附近接收器的误码率影响极小。