Channel and Noise Models for Nonlinear Molecular Communication Systems

TLDR

A tabletop molecular communication platform for short text messages across a room exhibits an impulse response that deviates from theoretical models due to imperfect components and turbulence, revealing its nonlinear nature and rendering conventional communication theory inapplicable. The study aims to refine the end‑to‑end impulse response models of this platform using experimental observations. By modeling the system’s nonlinearity as Gaussian noise, the authors reformulate the platform as a linear system corrupted by noise, enabling the application of standard communication‑theoretic tools.

Abstract

Recently, a tabletop molecular communication platform has been developed for transmitting short text messages across a room. The end-to-end system impulse response for this platform does not follow previously published theoretical works because of imperfect receiver, transmitter, and turbulent flows. Moreover, it is observed that this platform resembles a nonlinear system, which makes the rich body of theoretical work that has been developed by communication engineers not applicable to this platform. In this work, we first introduce corrections to the previous theoretical models of the end-to-end system impulse response based on the observed data from experimentation. Using the corrected impulse response models, we then formulate the nonlinearity of the system as noise and show that through simplifying assumptions it can be represented as Gaussian noise. Through formulating the system's nonlinearity as the output a linear system corrupted by noise, the rich toolbox of mathematical models of communication systems, most of which are based on linearity assumption, can be applied to this platform.