Increasing Robustness to Synchronisation Errors in Molecular Communications

Achieving precise synchronisation between transmitters and receivers is particularly challenging in diffusive molecular communication environments. To this end, pointto-point molecular communication system design is examined wherein synchronisation errors are explicitly considered. Two transceiver design questions are considered: the development of a sequential probability ratio test-based detector which allows for additional observations in the presence of uncertainty due to miss-ynchronisation at the receiver, and a modulation design which is optimised for this receiver strategy. The modulation is based on optimising an approximation for the probability of error for the detection strategy and directly exploits the structure of the probability of molecules hitting a receiver within a particular time slot. The proposed receiver and modulation designs achieve strongly improved asynchronous detection performance for the same data rate as a decision feedback based receiver by a factor of 1/2.