A Hands-On Molecular Communication Testbed for Undergraduate Education

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost, hands-on molecular communication testbed designed for undergraduate labs, enabling students to learn core MC concepts through a simple fluidic setup and achieve reliable data transmission.

Contribution

The work presents a practical, accessible molecular communication experiment for undergraduates, including detailed procedures and successful pilot results.

Findings

Students successfully reproduced the communication chain.

Achieved stable data rates of up to 0.5 bit/s.

Demonstrated effective teaching of MC principles with a simple setup.

Abstract

This work presents a hands-on molecular communication (MC) testbed developed for the undergraduate Communication Engineering lab course at the Institute for Communications Technology (IfN), TU~Braunschweig. The goal of the experiment is to provide students with an intuitive and reproducible introduction to MC concepts using a low-cost and accessible fluidic setup. The system employs a background water flow into which three dye colors are injected and symbols are detected by a multi-wavelength photosensor. A zero-forcing--based estimator is used to separate the spectral components and reliably identify the transmitted colors. The experiment is designed to be completed independently by students within a single laboratory session and requires only basic prior knowledge from introductory communication engineering courses. A detailed script accompanies the experiment, guiding students through channel characterization, color detection, pseudoinverse computation, and simple data transmission using on-off keying. In pilot trials, students successfully reproduced the entire communication chain and achieved stable data rates of up to 0.5~bit/s over a 15~cm channel. The proposed testbed demonstrates that fundamental principles of MC can be taught effectively using a compact and inexpensive experimental setup. The experiment will be integrated into an undergraduate lab course.