Evaluation of Non-Coherent Signal Detection Techniques for Mobile Molecular Communication

In recent years, there have been more and more research on molecular communication (MC). Because the deployment of mobile nanomachines may be required in some applications of MC, research on mobile MC has become a trend. The signal detection schemes for static MC are no longer applicable due to the time varying channel impulse response (IR), which is caused by the mobile characteristics of nanomachines. In this paper, a low complexity and non-coherent detection scheme is proposed for mobile scenario, which is based on the energy difference between two adjacent symbols. Most of the existing signal detection methods do not consider inter-symbol interference (ISI). Compared with those methods, the proposed scheme can achieve signal detection utilizing ISI without knowing channel state information (CSI). The bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed method is investigated under different conditions through simulations. Besides, the influence of mobility features of nanomachines on the signal detection accuracy is also investigated in detail. The simulation results demonstrate that the BER performance of the proposed scheme outperforms the latest signal detection scheme for short-distance mobile MC system with high velocity. Consequently, the detection scheme proposed in this paper can reduce the influence of nanomachines' mobility and has the potential to be used in mobile MC systems.