Optimal Receiver Design for Diffusive Molecular Communication With Flow and Additive Noise

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal receiver design for diffusive molecular communication systems with flow and noise, introducing practical detectors and analyzing their performance and tradeoffs.

Contribution

It introduces a maximum likelihood sequence detector and a family of weighted sum detectors for molecular communication with flow and enzymes, providing performance analysis and practical implementation insights.

Findings

Optimal detector achieves lower bit error probability than simpler methods.

Flow can improve detector performance under certain conditions.

Weighted sum detectors offer a practical alternative with comparable performance.

Abstract

In this paper, we perform receiver design for a diffusive molecular communication environment. Our model includes flow in any direction, sources of information molecules in addition to the transmitter, and enzymes in the propagation environment to mitigate intersymbol interference. We characterize the mutual information between receiver observations to show how often independent observations can be made. We derive the maximum likelihood sequence detector to provide a lower bound on the bit error probability. We propose the family of weighted sum detectors for more practical implementation and derive their expected bit error probability. Under certain conditions, the performance of the optimal weighted sum detector is shown to be equivalent to a matched filter. Receiver simulation results show the tradeoff in detector complexity versus achievable bit error probability, and that a slow flow in any direction can improve the performance of a weighted sum detector.