Recent developments in nanotechnology herald nanometer-sized devices expected to bring light to a number of groundbreaking applications. Communication with and among nanodevices will be needed for unlocking the full potential of such applications. As the traditional communication approaches cannot be directly applied in nanocommunication, several alternative paradigms have emerged. Among them, electromagnetic nanocommunication in the terahertz (THz) frequency band is particularly promising, mainly due to the breakthrough of novel materials such as graphene. For this reason, numerous research efforts are nowadays targeting THz band nanocommunication and consequently nanonetworking. As it is expected that these trends will continue in the future, we see it beneficial to summarize the current status in these research domains. In this survey, we therefore aim to provide an overview of the current THz nanocommunication and nanonetworking research. Specifically, we discuss the applications envisioned to be supported by nanonetworks operating in the THz band, together with the requirements such applications pose on the underlying nanonetworks. Subsequently, we provide an overview of the current contributions on the different layers of the protocol stack, as well as the available channel models and experimentation tools. Finally, we identify a number of open research challenges and outline several future research directions.

中文翻译：

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太赫兹纳米通信和网络调查：自上而下的视角


纳米技术的最新发展预示着纳米尺寸的设备有望为许多突破性的应用带来光明。为了释放此类应用的全部潜力，需要与纳米设备之间进行通信。由于传统的通信方法不能直接应用于纳米通信，因此出现了几种替代范式。其中，太赫兹（THz）频段的电磁纳米通信尤其有前景，这主要得益于石墨烯等新型材料的突破。因此，目前许多研究工作都针对太赫兹波段纳米通信以及纳米网络。由于预计这些趋势未来将持续下去，我们认为总结这些研究领域的现状是有益的。因此，在本次调查中，我们的目的是概述当前的太赫兹纳米通信和纳米网络研究。具体来说，我们讨论了预期由在太赫兹频段运行的纳米网络支持的应用，以及这些应用对底层纳米网络提出的要求。随后，我们概述了协议栈不同层的当前贡献，以及可用的通道模型和实验工具。最后，我们确定了一些开放的研究挑战，并概述了几个未来的研究方向。