Abstract
Although the cooperative transmission techniques have been developed for wireless sensor networks in recent years to improve the network transmission rate, delay and the bit error rate (BER) performance, the unique characteristics of the molecular communication (MC), such as implementing in nano-to-micro scale, the dynamic environmental conditions and the three-dimensional network topology, make it extremely necessary to reconsider the implementation and analysis of the cooperative relay transmission. In this paper, we analyze and investigate the molecular communication network consisting of single transmitter and receiver biological nanomachines with the same type of carrier molecule. This communication takes place over a single-relay link that is used the sense-and-release technique assisting our communication channel, in which intermediate relay do not attempt to decode the information. This paper considers that the cooperative relay technology, which fits to peer-to-peer transmission, can significantly benefit the combination between the cooperative diversity and the controlled-release-time in such a network. Furthermore, the inter-symbol interference (ISI) problem and reception noise are considered. The results illustrate that the sense-and-controlled-release-time (SCRT) scheme is the powerful technique in improving the BER performance up to 5dB SNR gain compared to the State-of-the-Art relaying schemes. As a result, this scheme can be substantially reduced the complexity of the receiver's threshold-based detection strategy. Finally, experimental results show that the MC throughput of the entire network is greatly increased by exploiting the benefit of the cooperative relay with SCRT scheme.