Investigation of Multiple Fluorescent Dyes in Macroscopic Air-Based Molecular Communication

An air-based macroscopic molecular communication testbed exploiting fluorescence properties of water-based solutions of Uranine and Rhodamine 6G is presented in this work. The testbed comprises of an industrial sprayer as its transmitter, a 2 m long tube as transmission channel, and a high-speed camera-based detector. The transmission distances considered cover a range over several tens of centimeters to meters. Concerning modulation schemes, molecular shift keying and molecular concentration shift keying are implemented and compared with on-off keying serving as a benchmark. It is shown that the former two can be used to decrease the bit error rate and/or to increase the bit rate. Furthermore, a platform is set for implementing a multiuser scenario, where the same channel is made accessible to multiple users by simultaneous use of different dyes for data transmission with small co-channel interference.