  In the nanonetworking literature, many solutions have been suggested to
enable the nanomachine-to-nanomachine communication. Among these solutions, we
focus on what constitutes the basis for molecular communication paradigms
--molecular communication via diffusion (MCvD). In this paper, we start with an
analytical modeling of a spherical absorbing receiver under messenger molecule
degradation and show that our formulations are in agreement with the simulation
results of a similar topology. Next, we identify how such signal
characteristics as pulse peak time and pulse amplitude are affected by
degradation. Indeed, we show analytically how in MCvD, signal shaping is
achieved through degradation. We also compare communication under messenger
molecule degradation with the case of no-degradation and electromagnetic
communication in terms of channel characteristics. Lastly, we evaluate the
communication performance of the scenarios having various degradation rates.
Here, we assess the system performance according to traditional network metrics
such as the level of inter-symbol interference, detection performance, bit
error rate, and channel capacity. Our results indicate that introducing
degradation significantly improves the system performance when the rate of
degradation is appropriately selected. We make a thorough analysis of the
communication scenario by taking into account different detection thresholds,
symbol durations, and communication distances.
