Impacts of erasure coding on robustness against molecular packet losses in aqueous, collisional environments

This paper considers diffusive molecular communication where biologically-enabled machines (or bio-nanomachines) exchange information by means of molecules in aqueous environments. It is known that molecular communication is inherently stochastic and unreliable, thereby significantly degrading communication performance such as latency and jiter. This paper focuses on robustness against molecule losses and investigates a robustness enhancement protocol that performs forward error correction. The transmitter bio-nanomachine encodes molecules in a redundant manner with parity-check erasure codes, and the receiver bio-nanomachine recovers the information embedded in lost molecules. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol enhances robustness against molecule losses and in turn improves communication performance.