Ambient Environmental Parameter Estimation for Reliable Diffusive Molecular Communications

Molecular communication is a promising communication technology that uses biomolecules such as proteins and ions to establish a communication link between nanoscale devices. In diffusive molecular communication, which uses diffusion characteristics of transfer molecules, the diffusion mechanism is mathematically derived as a Channel Impulse Response (CIR) to design an optimal detector structure. However, an ideal environment is assumed for deriving a CIR. Hence there is a concern that developed systems based on the derived CIR may not operate well in a realistic environment. In this study, based on the finite element method (FEM), we constructed a model of the environment with heterogeneous temperature distribution and actual volume of transmitting molecules to not only demodulate the bit information via maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) but also to estimate the temperature and volume of the transmitting molecules. Furthermore, in this study, we evaluated the performance of the MLSE method and investigated the effects of ambient environmental temperature distribution and volume of the transmitted molecules on diffusive molecular communication. The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed method can improve the communication performance by approximately 9 dB by estimating the temperature and transmit molecule volume.