Channel and Noise Models for Nonlinear Molecular Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops corrected models for a nonlinear molecular communication system, representing its nonlinearity as Gaussian noise, enabling the application of linear communication system tools to improve understanding and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces corrected impulse response models for a nonlinear molecular communication platform and models the nonlinearity as Gaussian noise to facilitate analysis using linear system techniques.

Findings

Corrected impulse response models based on experimental data.

Nonlinearity can be approximated as Gaussian noise.

Enables application of linear communication tools to nonlinear systems.

Abstract

Recently, a tabletop molecular communication platform has been developed for transmitting short text messages across a room. The end-to-end system impulse response for this platform does not follow previously published theoretical works because of imperfect receiver, transmitter, and turbulent flows. Moreover, it is observed that this platform resembles a nonlinear system, which makes the rich body of theoretical work that has been developed by communication engineers not applicable to this platform. In this work, we first introduce corrections to the previous theoretical models of the end-to-end system impulse response based on the observed data from experimentation. Using the corrected impulse response models, we then formulate the nonlinearity of the system as noise and show that through simplifying assumptions it can be represented as Gaussian noise. Through formulating the system's nonlinearity as the output a linear system corrupted by noise, the rich toolbox of mathematical models of communication systems, most of which are based on linearity assumption, can be applied to this platform.