Information transmission through a multiple access molecular communication channel

In this paper, we consider multiple access in diffusion-based molecular communication where multiple bio-nanomachines transmit bits of information to a micro-scale receiver device in a shared environment. Each bio-nanomachine acting as a transmitter releases a molecule to send a ´1´ and no molecule to send a `0´. The molecules released by transmitters then propagate by Brownian motion in the environment. The receiver device counts the number of molecules that arrived and estimates bits of information transmitted based on the number of molecules counted. A multiples access channel model is first developed to compute the capacity of the channel. Numerical results based on the model show that the channel capacity depends on various factors such as the number and location of transmitter bio-nanomachines.