Exact 3-D Channel Impulse Response for Spherical Receivers with Arbitrary Drift Directions

Abstract: Accurate channel modeling for spherical absorbing receivers is fundamental to the design of realistic molecular multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. While advanced modulation schemes have been proposed to mitigate interference, determining the channel impulse response (CIR) under arbitrary flow directions remains a challenge; existing exact solutions are restricted to either 1-D/no-drift scenarios or planar receiver geometries. Addressing this gap, we derive the first exact analytical CIR for a spherical receiver in a 3-D molecular communication system with uniform drift in an arbitrary direction. Unlike prior approximations that ignore the angle between the drift and the transmission axis, our approach utilizes the Girsanov theorem to analytically transform the hitting-time distribution from a stationary medium to a drifted one. The proposed closed-form expression not only eliminates modeling errors inherent in previous approximations for off-axis receivers but also enables efficient parameter-space exploration of critical system metrics (e.g., peak time and amplitude), a task that would be computationally costly with pure simulation-based approaches.