Type Based Sign Modulation and its Application for ISI mitigation in Molecular Communication

Abstract: An important challenge in design of modulation schemes for molecular communication is positivity of the transmission signal (only a positive concentration of molecules can be released in the environment). This restriction makes handling of the InterSymbol Interference (ISI) a challenge for molecular communication. Previous works have proposed use of chemical reactions to remove molecules from the environment, and to effectively simulate negative signals. However, the differential equation describing a diffusion-reaction process is non-linear. This precludes the possibility of using Fourier transform tools. In this paper, a solution for simulating negative signals based on the diffusion-reaction channel model is proposed. While the proposed solution does not exploit the full degrees of freedom available for signaling in a diffusion-reaction process, but its end-to-end system is a linear channel and amenable to Fourier transform analysis. Based on our solution, a modulation scheme and a precoder are introduced and shown to have a significant reduction in error probability compared to previous modulation schemes such as CSK and MCSK. The effect of various imperfections (such as quantization error) on the communication system performance are studied.