Multi-Axis Concentration Modulation for Mobile Molecular Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-axis concentration modulation framework for molecular communication, enabling higher order modulation and improved error performance in dynamic channels, surpassing traditional on-off keying schemes.

Contribution

It proposes a unified multi-axis modulation scheme with efficient constellation design and channel-independent decoding, enhancing spectral efficiency and robustness in molecular communication systems.

Findings

MAxCM improves spectral efficiency and error rate over OOK.

MAxRSK offers robustness in dynamic channels.

Numerical results demonstrate significant performance gains.

Abstract

Molecular communication (MC) is emerging paradigm that employs molecules as information carriers, inspired by biological signaling processes. Existing modulation schemes such as on-off keying (OOK), although simple to implement, suffer from high error probability in dynamic or hard-to-estimate channels due to their dependence on accurate channel information (CI). This work develops a unified MC constellation framework that allows higher order modulation across multiple dimensions and designs efficient constellation for dynamic MC. We propose a general multi-axis concentration modulation (MAxCM(K,M)) of modulation order M, utilizing K-dimensional constellation space with each axis corresponding to a particular molecular type, and information is jointly encoded in their concentrations. The corresponding ML decoders are derived for both static and dynamic MC under exact and partial CI. We show that the use of MAxCM can provide improvements in spectral efficiency (SE) and error rate. We then focus on a special subclass, namely multiple-axis ratio shift keying (MAxRSK), that encodes information into the concentration ratios. Its ML decoder is shown to be a weighted combiner, and design constraints are derived to enable channel-independent decoding. We study one such example, symmetric binary RSK (SBRSK), to show its robustness in dynamic channel conditions compared to OOK. Numerical investigations show significant performance gains over OOK and provide insights into optimal constellation design and receiver configurations.