Application of OFDM in Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication

In this letter, the application of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in the area of diffusion-based molecular communication is studied. The focus is on direct current biased optical OFDM, asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM, and pulse amplitude modulation discrete multi-tone transmission known from optical communications. Simulation results show that the OFDM parameters have to be chosen carefully and that the bit error rate performance is in-between that of standard on-off keying transmission with maximum-likelihood sequence estimation and fixed threshold detection. In addition, it is demonstrated that a proposed bit-loading algorithm can further improve the OFDM performance.