Adaptive transmission rate with a fixed threshold decoder for diffusion-based molecular communication

Abstract

In this paper, a simple memory limited transmitter for molecular communication is proposed, in which information is encoded in the emission rate of the molecules. Taking advantage of memory, the proposed transmitter reduces the ISI problem by properly adjusting its emission rate, which can be interpreted as water-filling on the expected interference. The error probability of the proposed scheme is derived and the result is compared with the error probability of the optimal transmitter obtained by dynamic programming methods. Furthermore, for the special case of channel with one symbol memory, a tight lower bound on error probability is derived. Numerical results show that the performance of introduced transmitter is near optimal. Simplicity is the key feature of the presented communication system: the transmitter follows a simple rule, the receiver is a simple threshold decoder, and only one type of molecule is used to convey the information.