MIMO Communications Based on Molecular Diffusion

Diffusion-based communication refers to the transfer of information using molecules as message carriers whose propagation is based on the law of molecular diffusion. Path loss can have a major impact on the link quality in molecular communication as the signal strength is shown inversely proportional to the cube of the communication distance. In this paper, various diversity techniques for Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) transmissions based on molecular diffusion are proposed to improve the communication performance in nanonetworks in the presence of Multi-User Interference (MUI). Analogous to radio communication, the concept of diversity and Spatial Multiplexing (SM) can be successfully applied in molecular communication. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first which investigates the aspects of MIMO transmissions for molecular communication. Numerical results show that the proposed diversity techniques can successfully lower the error rate. Further performance improvement can be obtained by properly allocating molecules among the transmission nodes if the Channel State Information (CSI) is available at the transmitter end. To optimize the system throughput, a dynamic switching mechanism between the diversity mode and the Spatial Multiplexing (SM) mode can be employed.