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PERFORMANCE OF MIMO MOLECULAR COMMUNICATIONS IN DIFFUSION-BASED CHANNELS A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science Musaab Saeed August 2017 PERFORMANCE OF MIMO MOLECULAR COMMUNICATIONS IN DIFFUSION-BASED CHANNELS Musaab Saeed Thesis Approved: Accepted: Advisor Interim Department Chair Dr. Hamid Bahrami Dr. Joan Carletta Committee Member Dean of the College Dr. Nghi Tran Dr. Donald P. Visco, Jr. Committee Member Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Jin Kocsis Dr. Chand K. Midha Date ii ABSTRACT Nanotechnology provides a promising solution for nano-scale communications consid- ering the nano-machine as the basic unit at this scale. The communication among the nano-machines is achieved by means of molecular communication. The most widespread model for a molecular communication channel is the diffusion-based chan- nel, where the information-carrying molecules propagate randomly in the medium based on Brownian motion. Other models include a positive drift from the transmit- ter nano-machine to the receiver nano-machine taking into account the life expectancy of the molecules, that is, the degradation over time. Due to this random motion, some molecules may arrive at the receiver after their intended time-slot, which can lead to interference with the molecules of the subsequent time-slots causing inter-symbol interference (ISI). Another source of interference is the inter-link interference (ILI), which emerges when multiple transmitters and receivers exist. In this work, we study the bit error rate (BER) performance of a molecular communications system having two transmitters and two receivers considering both ISI and ILI. Numerical results bring out the dependency of the BER performance of the system on the number of released molecules and distances between transmitters and receivers as well as the degradation parameter, drift velocity and the diffusion constant of the environment. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES . v LIST OF FIGURES . vi CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION . 1 II. PERFORMANCE OF MIMO MOLECULAR COMMUNICA- TIONS IN DIFFUSION-BASED CHANNELS . 4 2.1 Introduction . 4 2.2 System Model . 5 2.3 Bit Error Rate Analysis . 12 2.4 Numerical Results . 19 III. MIMO MOLECULAR COMMUNICATIONS VIA DIFFUSION WITH DRIFT AND DEGRADATION . 22 3.1 Introduction . 22 3.2 Modeling The Molecular Channel . 23 3.3 Bit Error Rate Analysis . 33 3.4 Numerical Results . 36 IV. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK . 40 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 42 iv LIST OF TABLES Table Page 3.1 Fitted model parameters for the system topology (d = 8 µm, R = 3 2 µm, h = 2 µm, D = 40 µm/sec ; ts = 1 sec; α = 0:3) . 29 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 2.1 Binomial pdf for n = 100 and p = 1=2................... 6 2.2 A simple MIMO molecular communication system . 9 2.3 BER performance versus the number of released molecules . 19 2.4 BER performance versus distance . 20 3.1 Proposed MIMO molecular communication system . 23 3.2 BER performance versus the number of released molecules for three values of α .................................. 37 3.3 BER performance versus distance for different values of α; v and D . 37 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Nanotechnology is a newly emerging field dealing with the development of nanoscale machines, or simply nano-machines. Nanonetworks, the interconnection of several nano-machines, is envisaged to expand the capabilities and applications of such ma- chines in many ways, such as allowing them to cooperate and perform more complex tasks, allowing dense deployments of interconnected nano-machines, and, in some application scenarios, enabling the interaction with remote nano-machines by means of broadcasting mechanisms [1]. The classical communication techniques (e.g., radio, optical or acoustic), cannot be applied to nanonetworks by merely reducing conven- tional networks dimensions. Therefore, the concept of molecular communication has received increasing attention in the recent years as an interdisciplinary research area that spans the applications of nanotechnology and provide a prominent approach for establishing communications at nanoscales [22]. The Molecular communication is not competitive, but complementary to the classical communication since it has unique communication features including low energy consumption, high compatibility with biological systems and diffusion in aqueous environment even though it has low speed, short range, and is stochastic in nature [6]. Inspired by the communication mechanisms that naturally occur amongst 1 living cells, molecular communication is defined as the transmission and reception of information by means of nano-machines using molecules as carriers [1, 22]. The trans- mitter encodes the intended messages onto the molecules using different properties, such as concentration [18, 14], type [3], releasing time [27, 5] and/or ratio [11] of the molecules. In the literature, there are two different propagation schemes in molecular communication: passive transport and active transport [8]. In passive transport, the information-carrying particles propagate through the environment via the diffusion mechanism, where the molecules follow Brownian motion to diffuse through a fluid medium connecting the transmitter and the receiver without using external energy [17, 23, 25, 4]. In active transport, information-carrying particles are transported by an external means including drift [10, 26, 27], molecular motors [7] and bacte- ria [3]. A considerable portion of the research efforts has been dedicated to passive molecular communication, i.e., diffusion-based molecular communication systems as in the aforementioned works, since it forms the backbone of the study of molecular communication field. However, some diffusion-based molecular communication chan- nels are characterized by Brownian motion with positive drift from the transmitter to the receiver [10, 26, 27]. Finally, the receiver attempts to recover the message by observing the pattern of the received molecules which are generally considered to be removed from the environment upon reception. Throughout this thesis, it is assumed that the information is encoded based on the concentration of the released molecules and we consider diffusion-based molecular communication channels characterized by Brownian motion with positive drift assum- 2 ing perfectly-absorbing spherical receivers and taking into account the life expectancy of the molecules as it plays a significant role in such communication scenarios. One issue that should be addressed when dealing with a diffusive channel is the inter- symbol interference (ISI) since some of the messenger molecules may fail to arrive at the receiver within their intended time-slots, due to the diffusion nature, and interfere with the messenger molecules of subsequent transmissions, causing ISI. Also, in the presence of multiple transmitters and multiple receivers, inter-link interference (ILI) emerges as another source of interference. In this work, we study the performance of a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) molecular communication system. The main focus of the thesis is on the study of the bit error rate (BER) performance of such molecular communication systems having two transmitters and two receivers and by considering both ISI and ILI. Numerical results show the depen- dency of the BER performance of the system on the number of released molecules and distances between transmitters and receivers as well as the degradation parameter, drift velocity and the diffusion constant of the environment. 3 CHAPTER II PERFORMANCE OF MIMO MOLECULAR COMMUNICATIONS IN DIFFUSION-BASED CHANNELS 2.1 Introduction In this chapter, we consider the diffusion-based propagation as one of the widely adopted propagation models for molecular communication. It refers to the random motion of the molecules to propagate from the transmitter to the receiver according to the properties of the diffusion channel [6]. We study the effect of inter-symbol inter- ference (ISI) and inter-link interference (ILI) [19] on the performance of a molecular communication systems using CSK. [9] studies the performance of a multiple-input single-output (MISO) system considering both ISI and ILI. However, the intended receiver for both the transmitters is the same. The system considered in our study can be thought of as a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) molecular communication system, in which two transmitters and a receiver with two receptors communicate simultaneously. Based on a diffusion-based channel model, we analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of a system composed of two separate transmitters and a receiver with two collocated receptors, where the detection is based on the joint observation of 4 molecular concentration from the two receptors and using the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) detection. Through numerical simulations, we verify the derived theoretical results and compare the performance of the MIMO system with that of the SISO and MISO molecular communications systems. 2.2 System Model In a diffusion-based channel, due to the random motion of the released molecules in the fluid medium, the time that the molecules arrive at the receiver is probabilistic. Assuming the transmitter is located at the origin and a molecule is released at time t = 0, the position of the released molecule at any time t is denoted by X(t), and the probability density function of X(t) can be written as [24] 1 x2 PX (x; t) = exp − (2.1) q 3 4Dt (4πDt) where x is the distance from the transmitting node and D is the diffusion constant of information molecules in the medium in µm2=sec unit. The probability that a molecule is absorbed by the receiver within time-slot duration ts is given by [16] R d p(d; ts) = erfc p (2.2) R + d 4Dts where erfc(x) is the complementary error function, d is the distance from the trans- mitter to the surface of the receiver and R is the radius of the receiver. 5 0.08 Binomial Distribution 0.07 Normal Distribution 0.06 0.05 0.04 0.03 0.02 0.01 0 0 20 40 60 80 100 Figure 2.1: Binomial pdf for n = 100 and p = 1=2 We assume that the transmitter releases n molecules into the medium for transmitting a bit 1 and no molecules to transmit a 0.