Diffusion-Based Reference Broadcast Synchronization for Molecular Communication in Nanonetworks

Molecular communication is a novel inter-disciplinary communication methodology at the nanoscale, which uses chemical or biological molecules as the information carriers. For many prospective molecular communication applications, the clock synchronization is a major issue. However, the existing solutions use the molecule releasing time for the clock synchronization schemes but ignore the molecule synthesizing time, which is not practical. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose a reference broadcast synchronization scheme. One nanomachine sends a broadcast beacon and the other two nanomachines records their receiving times. The receiving times are exchanged by that two nanomachines, then, the clocks between these two nanomachines can be synchronized. Owing to the fact that the information molecules propagate slowly with a large propagation delay, which also depends on the transmitter-receiver distance, so a delay estimation method is adopted in the synchronization scheme. The simulation results evaluate proposed synchronization scheme and show that the proposed scheme outperforms other clock synchronization schemes for molecular communication.