Using Vector Fields for Efficient Simulation of Macroscopic Molecular Communication

Abstract

Molecular communication has been identified as a communication concept complementing radio communication in some areas and being the unique solution in others. This particularly includes communication between nano machines but, more recently, also macroscopic application domains such as in fluid systems in a chemical factory. We are interested in simulating such macroscopic molecular communication both accurately as well as on a large scale. In this work, we make use of the concept of vector fields for efficient simulation of particle movements in a fluid environment. Such vector fields can be pre-computed so that the simulation of the communication itself is very fast. We discuss both the concepts and the methodological approach to outline the advantages of this idea and validate the system compared to lab measurements. Going beyond previous work, we also integrated both on-off keying (OOK) and pulse position modulation (PPM) to demonstrate the feasibility of the simulation concept even for more complex signal processing tasks.