Detection Process in Macroscopic Air-Based Molecular Communication Using a PIN Photodiode

An air-based macroscopic molecular communication (MC) testbed is presented exploiting the fluorescent properties of a highlighter-ink water-based solution. The testbed consists of a pressure sprayer as its transmitter, a 2 m long tube as the transmission channel, and a newly designed PIN-photodiode-based detector at the receiver side. The considered transmission distances cover a range over several tens of centimeters to meters. The on-off keying (OOK) modulation scheme is implemented in the new setup and a bit error rate (BER) analysis is performed over the channel length. A data transmission rate of 50 bit/s is achieved, which is more than twice that of the erstwhile implemented testbed using a camera-based detector, at a comparable BER. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is perhaps the fastest transmission rate ever achieved across all existing macroscale MC testbeds employing OOK.