Salinity-Based Molecular Communication in Microfluidic Channels

In this work, we present a novel portable, flexible and easy-to-use experimental setup for investigating salinity-based information transmission in microfluidic channels. At the receiver, the different salinity-levels are detected by a customized electronic circuit, which measures electrical conductivity via electrodes in the microfluidic channel. We provide a detailed description of the setup, including the microfluidic chip fabrication. Moreover, we develop a rigorous mathematical model of each testbed component and an end-to-end model of the system, which we have verified through experiments. Finally, we analyzed the error performance of the setup using optimum and sub-optimum detection algorithms, such as the Viterbi algorithm and threshold detection.