Digital Communication Techniques in Macroscopic Air-Based Molecular Communication

An air-based macroscopic molecular communication testbed exploiting fluorescence properties of water-based solutions of Uranine and Rhodamine 6G dyes is presented in this work. The testbed comprises of an industrial sprayer as its transmitter, a 2 m long tube as the transmission channel, and a high-speed camera-based detector. The considered transmission distances cover a range over several tens of centimeters to meters. The analytical end-to-end system model is extended to include the noise model in this work. Various modulation schemes exploiting the concentration levels of the sprayed dyes as the information source have been implemented and their performances are compared to the standard on-off keying. Spatial domain, along with the concentration of the dyes has been introduced as an additional degree of freedom into the testbed to improve the bit rate, and the performance is compared with respect to those modulation schemes using color and concentration levels of the dyes as degrees of freedom. Various equalization techniques and detection algorithms have also been implemented and compared. All comparative analyses are performed with respect to the measurements obtained from the testbed, the analytical models, and the particle-based Pogona simulator.