To account for nonstationarity, channel characterization and system design methods that employ the non-widesense stationary uncorrelated scattering (non-WSSUS) assumption are desirable. Furthermore, the inadequacy of the Doppler shift operator to properly account for the frequency shift in wideband channel implies that the timefrequency characterization methods that employ the Doppler shift operator are not appropriate for most wideband channels. In this article, the statistical time-scale domain characterization of the non-WSSUS wideband channel is presented. This approach employs the time scaling operator in order to account for frequency spreading, and also emphasizes on the nonstationarity of the wideband channel. The non-WSSUS statistical assumption termed localsense stationary uncorrelated scattering (LSSUS) is presented and employed in characterizing the nonstationary property of the time-varying wideband channel. The LSSUS channel model is then parameterized to provide useful coherence and stationarity/nonstationarity parameters for optimal system design. Some application relevance of the developed model in terms of channel capacity and diversity techniques are discussed. Measurement and simulation results show that the assumption of ergodic capacity and the performance of various diversity techniques depend on the degree of channel stationarity/nonstationarity. It is shown that the quantification of this degree of stationarity through the channel parameters can provide a way of tracking channel variation and allowing for adaptive application of diversity techniques and the channel capacity.
Targeted drug delivery (TDD) for disease therapy using liposomes as nanocarriers has received extensive attention in the literature. The liposome's ability to incorporate capabilities such as long circulation, stimuli responsiveness, and targeting characteristics, makes it a versatile nanocarrier. Timely drug release at the targeted site requires that trigger stimuli such as pH, light, and enzymes be uniquely overexpressed at the targeted site. However, in some cases, the targeted sites may not express trigger stimuli significantly, hence, achieving effective TDD at those sites is challenging. In this paper, we present a molecular communication-based TDD model for the delivery of therapeutic drugs to multiple sites that may or may not express trigger stimuli. The nanotransmitter and nanoreceiver models for the molecular communication system are presented. Here, the nanotransmitter and nanoreceiver are injected into the targeted body system's blood network. The compartmental pharmacokinetics model is employed to model the transportation of these therapeutic nanocarriers to the targeted sites where they are meant to anchor before the delivery process commences. We also provide analytical expressions for the delivered drug concentration. The effectiveness of the proposed model is investigated for drug delivery on tissue surfaces. Results show that the effectiveness of the proposed molecular communication-based TDD depends on parameters such as the total transmitter volume capacity, the receiver radius, the diffusion characteristic of the microenvironment of the targeted sites, and the concentration of the enzymes associated with the nanotransmitter and the nanoreceiver designs.
In this paper, the prodrug activation capability of enzymes is used to model and study a molecular communication (MC) system for targeted drug delivery (TDD). Specifically, we string together fundamental ideas from nano-robotics, particle diffusion and enzyme-catalyzed kinetics, to present an MC-based TDD model using a set of ordinary differential equations (ODE). We also derived closed-form analytical expressions for the input and output information of the system, and present their corresponding numerical results. Results show that the ratio of the receiver surface area to the enzyme concentration is important to the system's performance in terms of the deliverable potent drug concentration at the targeted site.
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