A Survey on Modulation Techniques in Molecular Communication via Diffusion

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advancements in modulation techniques for molecular communication via diffusion, comparing various schemes and analyzing their performance metrics to guide future research in biologically-inspired data transmission systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of five modulation types and discusses key performance metrics and open issues in molecular communication via diffusion.

Findings

Comparison of five modulation schemes with performance analysis

Numerical bit error rate evaluation of modulation techniques

Discussion of open challenges and future directions

Abstract

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.