Diffusion based molecular communication: A simple near optimal receiver

Nanonetworking indicates new solutions for many applications in biomedical and industrial fields. In this paper, we examine the diffusion-based molecular communication for information transmission in nano-networks. Design of practical decoders for resource-limited nano-networks requires an understanding the fundamental performance limits of memory-limited decoders. While some existing works in the literature do consider decoders with limited memory, to best of our knowledge, the tradeoff between memory and probability of error has not been studied in the literature. In this paper we make a first step by studying this tradeoff for a particular molecular communication channel between two nano-machines. A memory-limited, decision-aided decoder is proposed and shown to be near-optimal. The effect of the amount of memory on performance is characterized. This effect is specialized for the case of Molecular Concentration Shift Keying; it is shown that four bits of memory achieves nearly the same performance as infinite memory.