Spatial Modulation for Molecular Communication

In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient spatial modulation-based molecular communication (SM-MC) scheme, in which a transmitted symbol is composed of two parts, i.e., a space derived symbol and a concentration derived symbol. The space symbol is transmitted by embedding the information into the index of a single activated transmitter nanomachine. The concentration symbol is drawn according to the conventional concentration shift keying (CSK) constellation. Benefiting from a single active transmitter during each symbol period, SM-MC can avoid the inter-link interference problem existing in the current multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) based MC schemes, which hence enables low-complexity symbol detection and performance improvement. Correspondingly, we propose a low-complexity scheme, which first detects the space symbol by energy comparison, and then detects the concentration symbol by the maximum ratio combining assisted CSK demodulation. In this paper, we analyze the symbol error rate (SER) of the SM-MC and of its special case, namely the space shift keying-based MC (SSK-MC), where only space symbol is transmitted and no CSK modulation is invoked. Finally, the analytical results are validated by computer simulations. Our studies demonstrate that both the SSK-MC and SM-MC are capable of achieving better SER performance than the conventional MIMO-MC and single-input single-output-based MC, when given the same symbol rate.