Toward Location-aware In-body Terahertz Nanonetworks with Energy Harvesting

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel in-body nanonetwork architecture using Terahertz frequencies, enabling precise localization, energy harvesting, and two-way communication for healthcare applications with many nanodevices.

Contribution

It introduces location-aware, Wake-up Radio, and Software-Defined Metamaterials paradigms for energy-harvesting in-body nanonetworks, advancing in-body healthcare communication capabilities.

Findings

Supports fine-grained localization of nanonodes

Enables two-way communication with external devices

Handles large numbers of nanonodes efficiently

Abstract

Nanoscale wireless networks are expected to revolutionize a variety of domains, with significant advances conceivable in in-body healthcare. In healthcare, these nanonetworks will consist of energy-harvesting nanodevices passively flowing through the bloodstream, taking actions at certain locations, and communicating results to more powerful Body Area Network (BAN) nodes. Assuming such a setup and electromagnetic nanocommunication in the Terahertz (THz) frequencies, we propose a network architecture that can support fine-grained localization of the energy-harvesting in-body nanonodes, as well as their two-way communication with the outside world. The main novelties of our proposal lie in the introduction of location-aware and Wake-up Radio (WuR)-based wireless nanocommunication paradigms, as well as Software-Defined Metamaterials (SDMs), to THz-operating energy-harvesting in-body nanonetworks. We argue that, on a high level, the proposed architecture can handle (and actually benefits from) a large number of nanonodes, while simultaneously dealing with a short range of THz in-body propagation and highly constrained nanonodes.