Diversity-Based Non-Coherent Signal Detector for Molecular Communication via Reaction-Diffusion

Molecular communication is attractive to the emerging nano-scale communication systems. Traditionally, a detector recovers the information from only the concentration of single messenger molecule, while ignoring the variation of multiple participants in biochemical reaction. In this paper, we propose a non-coherent signal detector, by fully exploiting this ubiquitous biochemical diversity property of multiple reacting molecules. After extracting the channel state information (CSI) independent non-coherent features of received signals, the dynamical transient characteristics of messenger, reactant and product molecules are all utilized to implement the diversity detection, thus formulating a functional single-input multiple-output (SIMO) system via reaction-diffusion communication that has been barely considered before. We design both hard and soft combination strategies to attain the potential diversity gain arise from the dynamical co-variation of participants. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the advantages of our detector. Compared with conventional detectors that use only single messenger molecule, the bit error rate (BER) of is substantially reduced. Moreover, the BER performances of our non-coherent detector are even better than coherent maximum a posteriori (MAP) detector that requires accurate CSI estimation, which confirms the dramatic diversity gain provided by our detector. It would have great potentials in reliable nano-scale communications.

Automated summary

In this paper, a non-coherent signal detector is proposed to take advantage of the biochemical diversity property of multiple reacting molecules for reliable nano-scale communications. The detector utilizes the dynamical transient characteristics of messenger, reactant, and product molecules to achieve diversity detection in a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) system. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate the advantages of the detector, which outperform conventional detectors and even surpass the coherent maximum a posteriori (MAP) detector.