Learning When to Listen: Physics-Informed Synchronization in Molecular Channels

Abstract

Recent advances in chemical computing create new opportunities to realize biocompatible communication devices for application in precision medicine. Implanted microscopic transmitters and receivers can exchange information using molecules that diffuse through a biological medium, enabling them to form a network and jointly coordinate sensing and actuation operations. However, randomness in molecular propagation causes severe signal distortion, and receivers have limited computational capacity to compensate. The receiver design must therefore combine robustness to diffusion-induced distortion with computational architectures amenable to implementation in the chemical domain. To meet these requirements, we propose a physics-informed reinforcement learning (RL) framework implemented with the reservoir computing (RC) architecture. We study the task of synchronizing the receiver's clock with a sequence transmitted through a molecular communication (MC) channel. The physics part approximates the maximum-likelihood function synchronization objective, while the other learns a timing policy using this objective as its reward. Simulation results yield clock misalignments above half a second, compatible with molecular transmissions operating on the timescale of seconds.