  Recently, a tabletop molecular communication platform has been developed for
transmitting short text messages across a room. The end-to-end system impulse
response for this platform does not follow previously published theoretical
works because of imperfect receiver, transmitter, and turbulent flows.
Moreover, it is observed that this platform resembles a nonlinear system, which
makes the rich body of theoretical work that has been developed by
communication engineers not applicable to this platform. In this work, we first
introduce corrections to the previous theoretical models of the end-to-end
system impulse response based on the observed data from experimentation. Using
the corrected impulse response models, we then formulate the nonlinearity of
the system as noise and show that through simplifying assumptions it can be
represented as Gaussian noise. Through formulating the system's nonlinearity as
the output a linear system corrupted by noise, the rich toolbox of mathematical
models of communication systems, most of which are based on linearity
assumption, can be applied to this platform.
