Reed Solomon Codes for Molecular Communication with Full Absorption Receiver

Molecular communication (MC) has recently emerged as a novel paradigm for nano-scale communication utilizing molecules as information carriers. In diffusion-based molecular communication, the system performance is constrained by the inter-symbol-interference (ISI) caused by crossover of information carrying molecules in consecutive bits. To cope with this, we propose the Reed-Solomon (RS) codes as an error recovery tool, to improve the transmission reliability in diffusionbased MC systems. To quantify the performance improvement due to RS codes, we derive the analytical expression for the approximate bit error probability (BEP) of the diffusion-based MC system with the full absorption receiver. We further develop the particle-based simulation framework to simulate the proposed system with RS code to verify the accuracy of our derived analytical results. Our results show that, as the number of molecules per bit increases, the BEP of the system with RS codes exhibits a substantial improvement than that of non-coded systems. Furthermore, the BEP of the proposed system with RS codes can be greatly improved by increasing the minimum distance of the codeword.