Reliability and delay analysis of multicast in binary molecular communication

Abstract Molecular communication is a new and promising communication technology. However, we consider that molecular communication easily suffers from high unreliability and long delay due to the stochastic behavior of the molecules in a biological environment, thus it is essential to investigate the characteristics of reliability and delay in molecular communication. In this paper, we analyze the reliability and delay in multicast topology based on binary molecular communication model. First, we give the mathematical expressions of reliability and delay in different scenarios including a single link, a single path and multicast topology, respectively. In particular, we use retransmission mechanism for transmission failure. Then the numerical results derived from the simulation performances show how the parameters including diffusion coefficient, the distance between transmitter nanomachine and receiver nanomachine, the number of molecules emitted in each time slot, the number of slots and each time slot duration have impacts on reliability and delay. More importantly, under the same reliability, lower delay can be theoretically realized by binary molecular communication model compared to the concentration model of virus-based nanonetworks.