Error Performance Analysis of Diffusive Molecular Communication Systems With On-Off Keying Modulation

In this paper, we analyze the bit error rate (BER) of the diffusive molecular communication (DMC) systems employing on-off keying (OOK) modulation. We also analyze the BER of the OOK-modulated DMC systems with inter-symbol interference cancellation (ISIC). Our main motivation is to introduce alternative tools for analyzing and efficiently computing the BER of the DMC systems without or with ISIC. Specifically, for the OOK-modulated DMC systems without ISIC, we first derive an exact BER expression based on the Poisson modeling of DMC systems. Then, the Gaussian- and Gamma-approximation approaches are introduced to approximate the discrete Poisson distribution, and based on the approximation approaches, the corresponding BER expressions are derived. Furthermore, in order to reduce the computation complexity imposed by long inter-symbol interference, we propose the Monte-Carlo, simplified Poisson, simplified Gaussian, and the simplified Gamma approaches for BER computation. In the context of the OOK-modulated DMC systems with ISIC, we consider both the Poisson and Gaussian-approximation approaches for BER analysis. Again, exact and approximate BER expressions are derived under the Poisson, Gaussian-approximation, simplified Poisson, and simplified Gaussian approaches. Finally, the considered approaches are compared and validated by a range of performance results obtained from evaluation of the derived expressions or by simulations. Our studies show that the alternative approaches are in general effective for providing near-accurate BER estimation.