ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some resolution to the issues and illustrates several simple examples how information theory may be implemented properly to describe molecular communication processes. For a single molecular communication process, one can define the signal as the set of times at which signaling molecules are produced, and the response to this signal can be defined as the set of times at which these molecules bind to their target and thereby trigger the next cellular process in the cascade to commence. In the simplest case of a single molecule traversing the 1D drift–diffusion channel outlined in the previous subsection, the information content of the signal is encoded entirely in the timing of the molecule’s emission. The strength of the Claude Shannon information theory is that it provides a common framework for quantitatively comparing disparate communication paradigms. In more biologically relevant scenarios, communication occurs through a continual sequence of molecular channel traversals with stochastically distributed emission and absorption times.
