Embedded Coded Relay System for Molecular Communications

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) has urged scientists and industrialists to explore modern information and communication technology (ICT) as a means to reduce or even eliminate it. The World Health Organization recently reported that the virus may infect the organism through any organ in the living body, such as the respiratory, the immunity, the nervous, the digestive, or the cardiovascular system. Targeting the abovementioned goal, we envision an implanted nanosystem embedded in the intra living-body network. The main function of the nanosystem is either to perform diagnosis and mitigation of infectious diseases or to implement a targeted drug delivery system (i.e., delivery of the therapeutic drug to the diseased tissue or targeted cell). The communication among the nanomachines is accomplished via communication-based molecular diffusion. The control/interconnection of the nanosystem is accomplished through the utilization of Internet of bio-nano things (IoBNT). The proposed nanosystem is designed to employ a coded relay nanomachine disciplined by the decode and forward (DF) principle to ensure reliable drug delivery to the targeted cell. Notably, both the sensitivity of the drug dose and the phenomenon of drug molecules loss before delivery to the target cell site in long-distance due to the molecules diffusion process are taken into account. In this paper, a coded relay NM with conventional coding techniques such as RS and Turbo codes is selected to achieve minimum bit error rate (BER) performance and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), while the detection process is based on maximum likelihood (ML) probability and minimum error probability (MEP). The performance analysis of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of channel capacity and bit error rate by varying system parameters such as relay position, number of released molecules, relay and receiver size. Analysis results are validated through simulation and demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve delivery performance of the desirable drugs in the molecular communication system.