Reliable End-to-end Molecular Communication with Packet Replication and Retransmission

This paper proposes a novel design of reliable end-to-end molecular communication. In molecular communication proposed in this paper, source and destination bio-nanomachines exchange molecular packets through intermediate bio-nanomachines. A source bio-nanomachine forms a molecular packet and transmits the molecular packet into the environment. An intermediate bio-nanomachine detects a molecular packet and produces its copies. A destination bio-nanomachine, upon reception of a molecular packet, produces an acknowledgment molecular packet and transmits back to the source bio-nanomachine. Further, a source bio-nanomachine retransmits a molecular packet if no acknowledgment molecular packet is returned within a time-out period. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to study propagation delay in the reliable end-to-end molecular communication proposed in this paper. We also show how the proposed molecular communication is biochemically implemented using ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules.