High-accuracy distance estimation for molecular communication systems via diffusion

The advancement in nanotechnology has promoted the development of molecular communication. Nano-devices can communicate with each other by molecular communication at the nano- or micro-scale. The distance between the nanomachines is an important parameter in the molecular communication system. It is needed in the clock synchronization protocol, the transmission rate optimization, etc. In this paper, we propose a high-accuracy protocol for estimating distance based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). The receiver nanomachine estimates the distance by sampling the concentration from multiple symbols. The inter-symbol interference (ISI) and additive noise are considered. The Newton-Raphson method is used to calculate the estimated distance. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated by simulations in MATLAB. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves good performance in the ISI scenario compared with the existing schemes in terms of accuracy, but in the sacrifice of more computational resources. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.