Nanomachine Localization in a Diffusive Molecular Communication System

The information-bearing molecules are used for communication among nanomachines in a diffusion-based molecular communication (DMC) system. The location of the nanomachine is needed for improving the performance of a DMC system. In the literature, only the distance between a transmitter nanomachine (TN) and a receiver nanomachine is estimated. In contrast, an iterative maximum likelihood estimate of the nanomachine location is computed herein. Notably, both the signal-dependent noise and intersymbol interference (ISI) effects are considered for nanomachine localization. Further, the nanomachine localization is performed, when the locations of the receiver nanomachine are both known and unknown. Additionally, the condition for the unique localizability of the TN and the bound of the proposed estimator are obtained. The results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.