The Use of Coding and Protocols Within Molecular Communication Systems

This chapter focuses upon the use of coding and protocols within diffusion based molecular communication systems, laying the groundwork for future development in test bed implementations. The chapter starts with an introduction that briefly discusses coding and protocols used in traditional communication systems. Following this, details of the molecular channel are given, including the energy consumption constraints and a relevant mathematical framework. This discussion then leads onto potential encoding and decoding technologies. Next, original results on the use of Hamming codes in molecular communication systems are presented with a quantitative comparison against an uncoded molecular system. The impact of specific design parameters such as the number of molecules, energy, and transmission distance on the bit error rate (BER) is considered. Finally, a protocol, based upon the use of an acknowledgement (ACK) packet is presented as a further advancement to the field that the reader may wish to consider when designing future systems.