Transmitter and Receiver Architectures for Molecular Communications: A Survey on Physical Design with Modulation, Coding and Detection Techniques

Abstract

Inspired by Nature, molecular communications (MC), i.e., use of molecules to encode, transmit and receive information, stands as the most promising communication paradigm to realize nanonetworks. Even though there has been extensive theoretical research towards nanoscale MC, there are no examples of implemented nanoscale MC networks. The main reason for this lies in the peculiarities of nanoscale physics, challenges in nanoscale fabrication and highly stochastic nature of biochemical domain of envisioned nanonetwork applications. This mandates developing novel device architectures and communication methods compatible with MC constraints. To that end, various transmitter and receiver designs for MC have been proposed in literature together with numerable modulation, coding and detection techniques. However, these works fall into domains of a very wide spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to information and communication theory, quantum physics, materials science, nanofabrication, physiology and synthetic biology. Therefore, we believe it is imperative for the progress of the field that, an organized exposition of cumulative knowledge on subject matter be compiled. Thus, to fill this gap, in this comprehensive survey we review the existing literature on transmitter and receiver architectures towards realizing MC amongst nanomaterial-based nanomachines and/or biological entities, and provide a complete overview of modulation, coding and detection techniques employed for MC. Moreover, we identify the most significant shortcomings and challenges in all these research areas, and propose potential solutions to overcome some of them.