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.

翻译：具备太赫兹（THz）通信能力的纳米级设备有望部署于人体血流中。此类设备将支持基于精细传感的应用，用于检测各种健康状况的早期迹象（即生物标志物），以及诸如靶向给药等基于执行的应用。将此类事件的发生位置与事件本身相关联，将为精准诊断与治疗提供额外价值。这一愿景催生了一类新型体内定位技术，被概括为“流引导纳米级定位”。此类定位可搭载于太赫兹通信之上，通过纳米设备在血流中单次循环的持续时间，来检测观察到生物事件的身体区域。基于对“传统”室内定位客观基准测试长达数十年的研究及其最终标准化（如ISO/IEC 18305:2016），我们了解到，在早期阶段，所报告的性能结果往往不完整（例如，仅针对部分相关性能指标），基准测试实验在不同的评估环境和场景下进行，且使用的性能指标不一致。为避免流引导定位领域陷入类似的“锁定”状态，本文提出了一种用于此类定位标准化性能评估的工作流程。该工作流程以开源仿真框架的形式实现，能够综合考虑纳米设备的移动性、体内纳米设备与体表锚点之间的体内太赫兹通信，以及纳米设备层面的能量相关约束和其他技术限制（例如，基于脉冲的调制）。在考虑这些约束条件的基础上，该框架能够生成原始数据，这些数据可被输入不同的流引导定位解决方案中，以生成标准化的性能基准。