Increasing the Channel Capacity: Parallel Data Transmission in a Testbed for Molecular Communication

In the field of molecular communication, molecules or other particles in the nanoscale are used to transmit information. This rather new communication paradigm has a large application potential, ranging from medicine to industrial systems. As testbeds are essential for evaluating the capabilities of this new form of communication, we improve an existing water-based testbed to achieve parallel data transmission within one communication channel in this work. To this end, two different information carriers, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles and fluorescent particles, are used to simultaneously transmit independent data streams. A detection system for fluorescent particles was specifically developed for the fluid molecular communication testbed. Using parallel data transmission in the modified testbed the channel capacity was nearly doubled in comparison to a transmission using only a single type of information particles.