Macroscopic Air-Based Molecular Communication using Fluorescent Dyes
The presented work explores molecular communication as an alternative to radio wave-based communication, where infrastructure deployment using traditional wired and wireless communication is challenging. Any industry-specific molecular communication system, prior to its standardization, requires a framework to encompass various aspects of communication theory. This dissertation aims at achieving the goal through the design and development of a new macroscopic air-based molecular communication testbed based on the optical detection of information carriers in the form of water-based fluorescent dye solutions. The testbed outperforms many existing macroscopic molecular communication testbeds in terms of the data transmission distance and the data transmission rate. The end-to-end system model of the testbed is considered to define the analytical model comprising of the system impulse response and the noise process, incorporating the effects of air drag and gravitational forces. Higher-order modulation schemes are implemented exploiting concentration (such as on-off keying), time (such as pulse-position modulation), color of the dye (such as molecular shift keying) as well as the spatial domain (such as spatial shift keying). Equalization and detection algorithms are employed to mitigate inter-symbol interference and bit error rate (BER). A comparison of the resource requirements with respect to the implemented modulation schemes are also analyzed. Additionally, transmission errors are alleviated by the incorporation of channel codes. Emphasis is particularly laid on the implementation of low-complexity codes requiring less resources. The BER analyses of all these aspects are performed based on the testbed measurements as well as by means of Monte Carlo simulations based on the analytical model. Finally, a possibility to improve the data transmission rates further by modifying the transmitter and the receiver side hardware is discussed.
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