The Turbo Principle in Molecular Communications

Abstract:
This work introduces the turbo principle into the area of diffusion-based molecular communication (DBMC). By means of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) at the transmitter side, channel encoder and modulator are serially concatenated with a random interleaver in-between. At the receiver side, iterative processing between detector and channel decoder is performed. The convergence of the iterative processing is investigated by an extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis. In addition, the EXIT chart is used to predict the system performance and to determine the communication channel capacity including the DBMC channel. Bit-error-rate (BER) simulations are performed for advanced low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These numerical results confirm the benefit of turbo processing over non-iterative processing for DBMC applications.