Enhancing the Reliability of Large-Scale Multiuser Molecular Communication Systems

In recent years, conveying information using molecules via diffusion has attracted significant interest in micro and nanoscale applications. Yet, very little research have been conducted on the performance analysis of large-scale molecular communication (MC) systems with swarm of interfering receivers. In this type of MC system, the collective signal strength at a desired receiver can be impaired by the interference caused by other MC transmitters. The paper presents the first tractable analytical framework for the collective signal strength at a partially absorbing receiver due to a desired transmitter under the impact of a swarm of interfering transmitters in a three-dimensional (3D) large-scale MC system using stochastic geometry. We propose Reed Solomon (RS) coding as an error correction technique to combat the effects of interference caused by the multiple transmitters and the delayed molecules from the previous bits. We derive analytical expressions for the bit error probability (BEP) to evaluate the level of reliability that can be achieved by the proposed scheme. The results obtained using Monte Carlo simulations, matched extactly with the anlytical results, justifying the accuracy of the derivations. Results reveal that the RS codes are capable of providing an acceptable level of improvement in terms of BEP. Furthermore, by carefully selecting the code length, n, and the message length, k, of the RS(n, k) code, we can fine tune the BEP improvement to match the system requirements.