Opportunities and challenges in designing a blended international student project activity: Experiences from the EPIC project

In this paper we explain our experiences and observations on a blended international teaching/training student project activity designed for students of different academic levels and programs at different universities working together on a project given by an industrial partner. This project activity is designed based on the EPIC project, funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission, which aims to provide a framework for carrying out multi-cultural and multidisciplinary student projects for increasing employability in an international job market.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Transmitter localization in vessel-like diffusive channels using ring-shaped molecular receivers

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Molecular communication via diffusion in vessellike environment targets critical applications such as detection of abnormal and unhealthy cells. In this work, we derive the analytical formulation of the channel model for diffusion dominated movement, considering ring-shaped (i.e., patch) observing receivers and Poiseuille flow with the aim of localization of the transmitter cell. Then, we derive formulations using this channel model for two different application scenarios. We assume that the emission start time is known in the first scenario, and unknown in the second one. We successfully localize the transmitter cell using a single receiver for the first scenario, whereas two receivers are used to localize the transmitter cell in the second scenario. Lastly, the devised analytical framework is validated with simulations.Postprint (author's final draft

A survey on modulation techniques in molecular communication via diffusion

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.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 article, 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.This research is supported in part by the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under BIDEB-2232 program with the grant number 118C274, NSERC Discovery under Grant RGPIN-2020-04926, the NSF Center for Science of Information (CSoI) under grant CCF-0939370, and CFI John Evans Leaders Funds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Channel model of molecular communication via diffusion in a vessel-like environment Considering a Partially Covering Receiver

By considering potential health problems that a fully covering receiver may cause in vessel-like environments, the implementation of a partially covering receiver is needed. To this end, distribution of hitting location of messenger molecules (MM) is analyzed within the context of molecular communication via diffusion with the aim of channel modeling. The distribution of these MMs for a fully covering receiver is analyzed in two parts: angular and radial dimensions. For the angular distribution analysis, the receiver is divided into 180 slices to analyze the mean, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation of these slices. For the axial distance distribution analysis, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is applied for different significance levels. Also, two different implementations of the reflection from the vessel surface (i.e., rollback and elastic reflection) are compared and mathematical representation of elastic reflection is given. The results show that MMs have tendency to spread uniformly beyond a certain ratio of the distance to the vessel radius. By utilizing the uniformity, we propose a channel model for the partially covering receiver in vessel-like environments and validate the proposed model by simulations.Postprint (published version

Opportunities and challenges in designing a blended international student project activity: Experiences from the EPIC project

In this paper we explain our experiences and observations on a blended international teaching/training student project activity designed for students of different academic levels and programs at different universities working together on a project given by an industrial partner. This project activity is designed based on the EPIC project, funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission, which aims to provide a framework for carrying out multi-cultural and multidisciplinary student projects for increasing employability in an international job market.Peer Reviewe

MOL-eye: a new metric for the performance evaluation of a molecular signal

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Inspired by the eye diagram in classical radio frequency (RF) based communications, the MOL-Eye diagram is proposed for the performance evaluation of a molecular signal within the context of molecular communication. Utilizing various features of this diagram, three new metrics for the performance evaluation of a molecular signal, namely the maximum eye height, standard deviation of received molecules, and counting SNR (CSNR) are introduced. The applicability of these performance metrics in this domain is verified by comparing the performance of binary concentration shift keying (BCSK) and BCSK with consecutive power adjustment (BCSK-CPA) modulation techniques in a vessel-like environment with laminar flow. The results show that, in addition to classical performance metrics such as bit-error rate and channel capacity, these performance metrics can also be used to show the advantage of an efficient modulation technique over a simpler one

Channel model of molecular communication via diffusion in a vessel-like environment Considering a Partially Covering Receiver

By considering potential health problems that a fully covering receiver may cause in vessel-like environments, the implementation of a partially covering receiver is needed. To this end, distribution of hitting location of messenger molecules (MM) is analyzed within the context of molecular communication via diffusion with the aim of channel modeling. The distribution of these MMs for a fully covering receiver is analyzed in two parts: angular and radial dimensions. For the angular distribution analysis, the receiver is divided into 180 slices to analyze the mean, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation of these slices. For the axial distance distribution analysis, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is applied for different significance levels. Also, two different implementations of the reflection from the vessel surface (i.e., rollback and elastic reflection) are compared and mathematical representation of elastic reflection is given. The results show that MMs have tendency to spread uniformly beyond a certain ratio of the distance to the vessel radius. By utilizing the uniformity, we propose a channel model for the partially covering receiver in vessel-like environments and validate the proposed model by simulations

Transmitter localization in vessel-like diffusive channels using ring-shaped molecular receivers

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Molecular communication via diffusion in vessellike environment targets critical applications such as detection of abnormal and unhealthy cells. In this work, we derive the analytical formulation of the channel model for diffusion dominated movement, considering ring-shaped (i.e., patch) observing receivers and Poiseuille flow with the aim of localization of the transmitter cell. Then, we derive formulations using this channel model for two different application scenarios. We assume that the emission start time is known in the first scenario, and unknown in the second one. We successfully localize the transmitter cell using a single receiver for the first scenario, whereas two receivers are used to localize the transmitter cell in the second scenario. Lastly, the devised analytical framework is validated with simulations