Simulation study of molecular communication systems with an absorbing receiver: Modulation and ISI mitigation techniques

The research activities on Molecular Communication via Diffusion (MCvD) that can interconnect nanomachines, heavily depend on simulations to verify and evaluate the new communication paradigm. The existing simulation tools cannot be directly used for MCvD systems since the diffusion channel has different characteristics compared to classical communication channels. In an MCvD system, diffusion and demodulation processes have their own constraints and characteristics due to the impossibility of sending a negative number of molecules, the random movement of molecules, and a reception process of molecules that determines the signal. Therefore, a custom end-to-end MolecUlar CommunicatIoN (MUCIN) simulator for MCvD systems is presented. Compared to other simulators available in the literature, MUCIN simulator is an end-to-end simulator that considers first hitting process for the signal reception. It supports 1-D to 3-D environments, sending consecutive symbols, imperfect molecule reception, extendable modulation, and filtering modules. MUCIN simulator source code is available under BSD licensing for contributors from the nanonetworking community. Following the simulator analysis, a case study of inter-symbol-interference mitigation that utilizes the decision in one previous slot is introduced. The contribution of this paper is twofold; one is the modeling and the development of an end-to-end MCvD simulator, the other is the performance evaluation of the proposed inter-symbol interference filtering and demodulation techniques. (C) 2014 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.