10 Nov 2021
New paper on electrophoretic molecular communication accepted
"Electrophoretic molecular communication with time-varying electric fields" has been accepted for publication in Nano Communication Networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.10323)
Abstract
This article investigates a novel electrophoretic molecular communication framework that utilizes a time-varying electric field, which induces time-varying molecule velocities and in turn improves communication performance. For a sinusoidal field, we specify favorable signal parameters (e.g., phase and frequency) that yield excellent communication-link performance. We also analytically derive an optimized field function by formulating an appropriate cost function and solving the Euler-Lagrange equation. In our setup, the field strength is proportional to the molecular velocity; we verify this assumption by solving the Basset-Boussinesq-Oseen equation for a given time-varying electric field (forcing function) and examining its implications for practical physical parameterizations of the system. Our analysis and Monte-Carlo simulation results demonstrate that the proposed time- varying approach can significantly increase the number of information-carrying molecules expected to be observed at the receiver and reduce the bit-error probability compared to the constant field benchmark.