Nonlinear Receiver for Diffusion-Based Molecular Communications

Abstract

Diffusion based molecular communication (DBMC) acts as an indispensable element of nano-networking and Internet of things based applications. In DBMC, bio-molecules serve as information carriers for nanoscale systems. However, performance of the DBMC is limited by the following factors; nonlinear channel impulse response (CIR) of the DBMC which makes the mapping between the received symbols and transmitted symbols nonlinear, inter-symbol-interference (ISI) due to long tail of CIR of the DBMC which degrades the overall bit error rate (BER) performance, and stochastic movement of the molecules which introduces noise at the receiver. Most of the prior works on receiver design for molecular communication (MC) are based on linear detection algorithms, which are sub-optimal for the nonlinear DBMC system. Thus, to improve the performance of MC system, for the first time, we propose adaptive nonlinear receiver for MC based on the kernel least mean square algorithm, in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Numerical results show that the proposed nonlinear receiver improves BER performance as compared to the existing linear detection algorithms-based receiver.