Communication System Design and Analysis for Asynchronous Molecular Timing Channels

Abstract: Two new asynchronous modulation techniques for molecular timing (MT) channels are proposed. One based on modulating information on the time between two consecutive releases of indistinguishable information particles, and one based on using distinguishable particles. For comparison, we consider the synchronized modulation scheme where information is encoded in the time of release and decoded from the time of arrival of particles. We show that all three modulation techniques result in a system that can be modeled as an additive noise channel, and we derive the expression for the probability density function of the noise. Next, we focus on binary communication and derive the associated optimal detection rules for each modulation. Since the noise associated with these modulations has an infinite variance, geometric power is used as a measure for the noise power, and we derive an expression for the geometric SNR (G-SNR) for each modulation scheme. Numerical evaluations indicate that for these systems the bit error rate (BER) is constant at a given G-SNR, similar to the relation between BER and SNR in additive Gaussian noise channels. We also demonstrate that the asynchronous modulation based on two distinguishable particles can achieve a BER performance close to the synchronized modulation scheme.