A Survey on Modulation Techniques in Molecular Communication via Diffusion

This survey paper focuses on modulation aspects of molecular communication, an emerging field focused on building biologically-inspired systems that embed data within chemical signals. The primary challenges in designing these systems are how to encode and modulate information onto chemical signals, and how to design a receiver that can detect and decode the information from the corrupted chemical signal observed at the destination. In this paper, we focus on modulation design for molecular communication via diffusion systems. In these systems, chemical signals are transported using diffusion, possibly assisted by flow, from the transmitter to the receiver. This tutorial presents recent advancements in modulation and demodulation schemes for molecular communication via diffusion. We compare five different modulation types: concentration-based, type-based, timing-based, spatial, and higher-order modulation techniques. The end-to-end system designs for each modulation scheme are presented. In addition, the key metrics used in the literature to evaluate the performance of these techniques are also presented. Finally, we provide a numerical bit error rate comparison of prominent modulation techniques using analytical models. We close the tutorial with a discussion of key open issues and future research directions for design of molecular communication via diffusion systems.Comment: Preprint of the accepted manuscript for publication in IEEE Surveys and Tutorial

Diffusive Molecular Communications with Reactive Signaling

This paper focuses on molecular communication (MC) systems where the signaling molecules may participate in a reversible bimolecular reaction in the channel. The motivation for studying these MC systems is that they can realize the concept of constructive and destructive signal superposition, which leads to favorable properties such as inter-symbol interference (ISI) reduction and avoiding environmental contamination due to continuous release of molecules into the channel. This work first derives the maximum likelihood (ML) detector for a binary MC system with reactive signaling molecules under the assumption that the detector has perfect knowledge of the ISI. The performance of this genie-aided ML detector yields an upper bound on the performance of any practical detector. In addition, two suboptimal detectors of different complexity are proposed. The proposed ML detector as well as one of the suboptimal detectors require the channel response (CR) of the considered MC system. Moreover, the CR is needed for the performance evaluation of all proposed detectors. However, analyzing MC with reactive signaling is challenging since the underlying partial differential equations that describe the reaction-diffusion mechanism are coupled and non-linear. Therefore, an algorithm is developed in this paper for efficient computation of the CR to any arbitrary transmit symbol sequence. The accuracy of this algorithm is validated via particle-based simulation. Simulation results using the developed CR algorithm show that the performance of the proposed suboptimal detectors can approach that of the genie- aided ML detector. Moreover, these results show that MC systems with reactive signaling have superior performance relative to those with non-reactive signaling due to the reduction of ISI enabled by the chemical reactions.Comment: This paper has been submitted to IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 201

Improving Receiver Performance of Diffusive Molecular Communication with Enzymes

This paper studies the mitigation of intersymbol interference in a diffusive molecular communication system using enzymes that freely diffuse in the propagation environment. The enzymes form reaction intermediates with information molecules and then degrade them so that they cannot interfere with future transmissions. A lower bound expression on the expected number of molecules measured at the receiver is derived. A simple binary receiver detection scheme is proposed where the number of observed molecules is sampled at the time when the maximum number of molecules is expected. Insight is also provided into the selection of an appropriate bit interval. The expected bit error probability is derived as a function of the current and all previously transmitted bits. Simulation results show the accuracy of the bit error probability expression and the improvement in communication performance by having active enzymes present.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 1 table. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience (submitted January 22, 2013; minor revision October 16, 2013; accepted December 4, 2013