Detection Interval for Diffusion Molecular Communication: How Long is Enough?

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optimized detection interval for molecular communication systems to reduce inter-symbol interference, improving bit error rate performance with a novel metric and deriving a closed-form solution.

Contribution

It proposes a new method to optimize detection intervals in molecular communication, including a modified SINAR metric and a closed-form optimal interval derivation.

Findings

mSINAR outperforms competing schemes in BER

Optimal detection interval closely matches exhaustive search results

Proposed method effectively reduces inter-symbol interference

Abstract

Molecular communication has a key role to play in future medical applications, including detecting, analyzing, and addressing infectious disease outbreaks. Overcoming inter-symbol interference (ISI) is one of the key challenges in the design of molecular communication systems. In this paper, we propose to optimize the detection interval to minimize the impact of ISI while ensuring the accurate detection of the transmitted information symbol, which is suitable for the absorbing and passive receivers. For tractability, based on the signal-to-interference difference (SID) and signal-to-interference-and-noise amplitude ratio (SINAR), we propose a modified-SINAR (mSINAR) to measure the bit error rate (BER) performance for the molecular communication system with a variable detection interval. Besides, we derive the optimal detection interval in closed form. Using simulation results, we show that the BER performance of our proposed mSINAR scheme is superior to the competing schemes, and achieves similar performance to optimal intervals found by the exhaustive search.