This letter investigates nanoscale wireless communications in human tissues. Starting from propagation models, validated through real experiments, channel capacity and transmission ranges are derived for different physical transmission settings. Results highlight the challenges characterizing the communication in such a medium, thus, paving the way to novel research activities devoted to the design of pioneering nanomedical applications. Index Terms-Channel capacity, human tissue, nano scale communications, THz band.
I. INTRODUCTIONT HE Internet of nano-things (IoNT) paradigm is quickly gaining momentum thanks to the recent advances of nanotechnologies. In its rationale, a potentially high number of nanometric devices, equipped with basic processing/communication capabilities, can be diffused in the environment for fine-grained data acquisition in extremely pervasive monitoring systems [1]. With reference to the healthcare domain, the objective is to deploy a network of therapeutic nanomachines able to operate either in inter and intra-cellular areas of the human body, thus enabling pioneering applications, including immune system support, bio-hybrid implant, drug delivering system, heath monitoring, and genetic engineering. While electromagnetic (EM)-based communications, handled in the terahertz band, are considered a viable technique for supporting data exchange in the Internet of Nano-Things (IoNT) [1], the study of wireless transmission schema at the nano-scale should be carefully addressed to sustain the progress of this technology.The analysis of the channel capacity in the lossy air medium has been deeply investigated in [2], where it is demonstrated that terahertz communications offer very high physical transmission rates (i.e., more than 1 Tb/s) and transmission Manuscript
. (2016) Terahertz channel characterization inside the human skin for nano-scale body-centric networks. IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology, 6(3), pp. 427-434. (doi:10.1109/TTHZ.2016.2542213) This is the author's final accepted version.There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/141057/ Abstract-This paper focuses on the development of novel radio channel model inside the human skin at the terahertz range, which will enable the interaction among potential nano-machines operating in the inter cellular areas of the human skin. Thorough studies are performed on the attenuation of electromagnetic waves inside the human skin, while taking into account the frequency of operation, distance between the nano-machines and number of sweat ducts. A novel channel model is presented for communication of nano-machines inside the human skin and its validation is performed by varying the aforementioned parameters with a reasonable accuracy. The statistics of error prediction between simulated and modeled data are: mean (µ) = 0.6 dB and standard deviation (σ) = 0.4 dB, which indicates the high accuracy of prediction model as compared with measurement data from simulation. In addition, the results of proposed channel model are compared with Terahertz Time Domain Spectroscopy based measurement of skin sample and the statistics of error prediction in this case are: µ = 2.10 dB and σ = 6.23 dB, which also validates the accuracy of proposed model. Results in this paper highlight the issues and related challenges while characterizing the communication in such a medium, thus paving the way towards novel research activities devoted to the design and the optimization of advanced applications in the health-care domain.
This paper presents the investigation of the electromagnetic properties of human skin tissues using Terahertz Time Domain Spectroscopy (THz-TDS). The material parameters i.e., refractive index and absorption coefficient are extracted for artificially synthesized skin cultured using fibroblast cells and collagen type I reagent. The increase in cell count number by 200% will cause a distinctive decrease in refractive index and absorption coefficient values. In addition to material parameters, in-body channel parameters i.e., total pathloss and molecular noise temperature of the skin are also calculated. The results show the dependency of channel parameters on molecular features and hydration level of the skin. Such findings will path the way for more rigorous THz channel analysis and network modeling to be applied for body-centric nano-communication specifically in the bioengineering domain.
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