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.