Design Optimization of a MIMO Receiver for Diffusion-based Molecular Communication

Path loss is a main challenge in Molecular Communications. When molecules carry information based only on a natural diffusion, the number of molecules that can be received is inversely proportional to the square distance between the transmitter and the receiver, thus hugely impacting the received signal strength. The use of a Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) technique can improve the performance of molecular communications by increasing the data rate. In this paper, we studied the receiver used in molecular MIMO communications. We focused on three important parameters for the receiver design, which are the channel distance, the distance between the detectors constructing the receiver and the detectors diameter. To optimize the design of a 3×3 MIMO receiver, we used AcCoRD simulator to obtain 3D stochastic simulations for each scenario. We evaluated the simulation results by studying the error probability and the number of molecules representing the signal strength. We then proposed two optimization problems that aim at optimizing the receiver parameters choice, and two algorithms to solve the problems. The study shows that a judicious choice of the three parameters combination can optimize MIMOs receiver design, which can decrease the error probability and improve the performance of Molecular Communication.