One Symbol Blind Synchronization in SIMO Molecular Communication Systems

Molecular communication offers new possibilities in the micro- and nano-scale application environments. Similar to other communication paradigms, molecular communication also requires clock synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver nanomachine in many time- and control-sensitive applications. This letter presents a novel high-efficiency blind clock synchronization mechanism. Without knowing the channel parameters of the diffusion coefficient and the transmitter-receiver distance, the receiver only requires one symbol to achieve synchronization. The samples are used to estimate the propagation delay by least square method and achieve clock synchronization. Single-input multiple-output diversity design is then proposed to mitigate channel noise and therefore to improve the synchronization accuracy. The simulation results show that the proposed clock synchronization mechanism has a good performance and may help chronopharmaceutical drug delivery applications.