Novel decoding methods of constant weight coding for molecular communications

Publication date: Available online 28 November 2018Source: Nano Communication NetworksAuthor(s): Mehmet Gorkem Ulkar, Ali Emre Pusane, Tuna TugcuAbstractMolecular communications via diffusion (MCvD) is a popular research area thanks to its potential applications, mostly in nanocommunications. Despite many recent publications on MCvD, the studies on error correction/channel coding for molecular communications are limited. Low weight channel codes have been proposed in the literature due to their energy efficiency and ISI mitigation. We add the constant weight condition on top of being low weight for MCvD channel codes, since the information of all codewords having the same weight can be utilized at the receiver. Moreover, encoding simplicity of Constant Low Weight Codes (CLWC) compared to the conventional coding schemes makes them appealing for MCvD, considering nanodevice limitations. This paper focuses on the decoding strategies for CLWC at the receiver side. Threshold and sorting-based decoders for molecular communications are reviewed and two different novel decoding mechanisms for CLWC are proposed. Iterative sorting decoder is a decision-feedback heuristic method that iteratively calculates the ISI from a better estimation at each step. The second proposed method is the super trellis decoder, which is a maximum likely sequence estimator. Outer states in the trellis denote the number of total weights in a sequence, whereas inner states represent the memory of the ISI chan...

Source: Nano Communication Networks - November 29, 2018 Category: Nanotechnology Source Type: research