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walk, such as calcium signaling in cell tissues, neuron communication by means of neurotransmitters,
and bacterial quorum sensing, include only the contribution of the Brownian stochastic force f. MC
systems based on drifted random walk, such as MC in the cardiovascular system, microfluidic
systems, and pheromone communication between plants, include both f and a drift velocity vn(t) as
function of the time t for each molecule n, which is independent of the Brownian motion. MC systems
based on active transport, such as those based on molecular motors and bacteria chemotaxis, include
instead a deterministic force Fn(t) added to f. For each of these categories of MC systems, and based
on the aforementioned Langevin equation decomposition, we provide a general information capacity
expression under simplifying assumptions and subsequently discuss these results in light of the
functional blocks of more specific MC system models, including cases where a closed-form capacity
expression cannot be analytically derived. This statistical-mechanics-based framework provides a
common ground that not only allows existing researchers in this field to formalize their direction
taken in the last decade in this high-level framework but also provides future researchers with a well-
defined methodology to evaluate the performance of the existing and to-be-discovered MC systems.
We believe this contribution will be foundational for this discipline on the way to standardization,
and an important milestone for the engineering of future MC systems.
MC promises to better understand communications in biological systems, and reciprocally develop
biologically-inspired approaches for communication systems. Since it provides a disruptive
technology based on interfacing directly with living cells and organisms which enables an
unprecedented way of reaching health information in the living body, which we believe will be at the
core of next-generation ICT technologies for human health.

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* This talk is based on the following three papers:
1. Akyildiz, I. F., Guler, U., Ozkaya-Ahmedov, T., Sarioglu, A. F., Unluturk, B. D., “PANACEA: An Internet of
Bio-NanoThings Application for Early Detection and Mitigation of Infectious Diseases,” submitted to IEEE
Access, 2019.
2. Akyildiz, I. F., Pierobon, M., Balasubramaniam, S., “An Information Theoretic Framework to Analyze
Molecular Communication Systems Based on Statistical Mechanics,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 107, no. 7,
pp. 1230-1255, 2019.
3. Akyildiz, I. F., Pierobon, M., Balasubramaniam, S., and Koucheryavy, Y., "Internet of BioNanoThings,"
IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 32-40, March 2015.

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