Mobile molecular communications: Positional-distance codes

Molecular communications between mobile nano-robots will likely yield bit transposition errors. In such a scenario, it is important to design and test a new family of appropriate forward-error-correction codes. In this paper, we first construct a proof-of-concept robot to demonstrate how transposition errors arise. We then review state-of-the-art research in positional-distance codes and implement such codes onto the robot to achieve reliable mobile molecular communications. In order to imitate a large number of transposition errors, we model the mobile molecular communication channel as a double random walk channel. The results show that the positional-distance codes can achieve a superior performance over classical Hamming-distance codes and the performance is not sensitive to the initial starting position of the robots.