Volterra-DFE based Nonlinear Equalizer for Diffusion based Molecular Communications

Abstract

Molecular communication (MC) has emerged as a viable solution for nanonetworks, where bio-molecules are used to transmit the information. However, one of the factors that limits the throughput of diffusion based MC (DBMC) is inter-symbol interference (ISI), which arises due to long tail of channel impulse response (CIR) of the DBMC. In addition to ISI, performance of the DBMC based systems is also limited by the nonlinear CIR of DBMC, which results in nonlinear distortions at the receiver, and degrades the overall bit error rate (BER) performance. Conventional minimum mean square error (MMSE) and decision feedback equalizer (DFE) based receivers deliver suboptimal performance for nonlinear systems. In this paper, for the first time, we propose Volterra-DFE based nonlinear equalizer for mitigating the aforementioned DBMC channel impairments. Numerical results show that the proposed Volterra-DFE algorithm exhibits superior BER performance over the conventional MMSE and DFE based equalizers. © 2019 IEEE.