Toward Standardized Performance Evaluation of Flow-guided Nanoscale Localization
Arnau Brosa López, Filip Lemic, Jakob Struye, Jorge Torres Gómez, Esteban Municio, Carmen Delgado, Gerard Calvo Bartra, Falko Dressler, Eduard Alarcón, Jeroen Famaey, Sergi Abadal, Xavier Costa Pérez
TL;DR
A workflow for standardized performance evaluation of “traditional” indoor localization of nanoscale devices with Terahertz communication capabilities is proposed, able to jointly account for the mobility of the nanodevices, in-body THz communication with on-body anchors, and energy-related and other technological constraints at the nanodevice level.
Abstract
Nanoscale devices with Terahertz (THz) communication capabilities are envisioned to be deployed within human bloodstreams. Such devices will enable fine-grained sensing-based applications for detecting early indications (i.e., biomarkers) of various health conditions, as well as actuation-based ones such as targeted drug delivery. Associating the locations of such events with the events themselves would provide an additional utility for precision diagnostics and treatment. This vision yielded a new class of in-body localization coined under the term "flow-guided nanoscale localization". Such localization can be piggybacked on THz communication for detecting body regions in which biological events were observed based on the duration of one circulation of a nanodevice in the bloodstream. From a decades-long research on objective benchmarking of "traditional" indoor localization, as well as its eventual standardization (e.g., ISO/IEC 18305:2016), we know that in early stages the reported performance results were often incomplete (e.g., targeting a subset of relevant performance metrics), carrying out benchmarking experiments in different evaluation environments and scenarios, and utilizing inconsistent performance indicators. To avoid such a "lock-in" in flow-guided localization, in this paper we propose a workflow for standardized performance evaluation of such localization. The workflow is implemented in the form of an open-source simulation framework that is able to jointly account for the mobility of the nanodevices, in-body THz communication between with on-body anchors, and energy-related and other technological constraints (e.g., pulse-based modulation) at the nanodevice level. Accounting for these constraints, the framework is able to generate the raw data that can be streamlined into different flow-guided localization solutions for generating standardized performance benchmarks.