Theoretical Concept Study of Cooperative Abnormality Detection and Localization in Fluidic-Medium Molecular Communication

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for cooperative abnormality detection and localization systems by exploiting molecular communication setup. The system consists of mobile sensors in a fluidic medium, which are injected into the medium to search the environment for abnormality. Some fusion centers (FC) are placed at specific locations in the medium, which absorb all sensors arrived at their locations, and by observing its state, each FC decides on the abnormality existence and/or its location. To reduce the effects of sensor imperfection, we propose a scheme where the sensors release some molecules (i.e., markers) into the medium after they sense an abnormality. If the goal is abnormality detection, the released molecules are used to cooperatively activate other sensors. If the goal is abnormality localization, the released molecules are used by the FCs to determine the location. In our model, both sensors' imperfection and markers background noise are taken into account. For the detection phase, we consider two sensor types based on their activation strategy by markers. To make the analysis tractable, we assume some ideal assumptions for the sensors' model. We investigate the related binary hypothesis testing problem and obtain the probabilities of false alarm and miss-detection. It is shown that using sensors with the ability of cooperatively activating each other can significantly improve the detection performance in terms of probability of error. For the localization phase, we consider two types of FCs based on their capability in reading sensors' storage levels. We study their performance and obtain the optimal and sub-optimal decision schemes and also the probability of localization error for both perfect and imperfect sensing regimes.