Toward Standardized Performance Evaluation of Flow-guided Nanoscale Localization

Nanoscale devices featuring Terahertz (THz)-based wireless communication capabilities are envisioned to be deployed within human bloodstreams. Such devices are envisaged to enable fine-grained sensing-based applications for detecting events for early indications of various health conditions, as well as actuation-based ones such as the targeted drug delivery. Intuitively, associating the locations of such events with the events themselves would provide an additional utility for precision diagnostics and treatment. This vision recently yielded a new class of in-body localization coined under the term "flow-guided nanoscale localization". Such localization can be piggybacked on THz-based communication for detecting body regions in which 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 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 discuss a workflow for standardized evaluation of such localization. The workflow is implemented in the form of an open-source framework that is able to jointly account for the mobility of the nanodevices in the bloodstream, in-body THz communication between the nanodevices and on-body anchors, and energy-related and other technological constraints 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 solutions for generating standardized performance benchmarks.