Performance Analysis of Amplitude Modulation Schemes for Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication

In this paper, we investigate modulation techniques for end-to-end communication between two nanomachines placed in a fluid medium. The information is encoded as the number of molecules transmitted leading to such schemes being aptly named as amplitude modulation schemes. The propagation of molecules obeys the laws of Brownian motion with a positive drift from the transmitter to the receiver nanomachine. The channel is characterized by two parameters of the fluid medium: the drift velocity and the diffusion coefficient. Assuming the molecules degrade over time, the life expectancy of the molecules also plays a significant role in such communication scenarios. We consider an M-ary modulation scheme and also propose an extended scheme, which is a slight variation of a binary modulation scheme. The received symbol is corrupted by interference from the previous symbols as well as other noise sources present in the medium. Considering maximum likelihood detection at the receiver, we derive analytical expressions for the end-to-end symbol error probability and the capacity for these modulation schemes. Numerical results bring out the impact of various parameters on the performance of the system. Our results show that these schemes offer a promising approach to set up molecular communication over diffusion-based channels.