A Novel Time-Based Modulation Scheme in Time-Asynchronous Channels for Molecular Communications

Abstract: In this paper, a novel time-based modulation scheme is proposed in the time-asynchronous channel for diffusion-based molecular communication systems with drift. Based on this modulation scheme, we demonstrate that the sample variance of information molecules' arrival time approximately follows a noncentral chi-squared distribution. According to its conditional probability density function (PDF), the asynchronous receiver designs are deduced based on the maximum likelihood (ML) detection, with or without background noise in the channel environment. Since the proposed schemes can be applied to the case of transmitting multiple information molecules, simulation results reveal that the bit error ratio (BER) performance improves with the increase of the number of released information molecules. Furthermore, when the background noise is not negligible, our proposed asynchronous scheme outperforms the asynchronous modulation techniques based on encoding information on the time between two consecutive release of information molecules.