Performance Analysis of Virtual Communication Between Thermal Cameras and Contact-tracing Applications for COVID-19

Abstract

Late 2019 and a significant part of early 2020 have witnessed the outbreak of Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) across the world. As a desperate attempt to control the virus spread, many countries are enforcing measures to restrict large concentration of people at one place and are implementing some form of contact tracing mobile application to quickly track close interactions between people. Furthermore, as businesses come out of lockdowns, they are required to record the temperature of all visitors and staffs that move in and out of their premises. Some businesses are employing medical grade contactless thermal imaging cameras for scanning temperature. Communication and sharing of information between the contact tracing application and thermal cameras would make an effective tool against COVID-19. However, there is a disconnect between the contact tracing applications and contactless thermal imaging solutions because they employ different communication stacks, platforms, data formats, and protocols. Furthermore, any kind of middleware to mediate between the cameras and the mobile applications would render the solution useless because of the induced latencies. In this paper, we are proposing to virtualize the communication between the cameras and mobile applications so that they could communicate and interoperate over a common protocol stack. We further model and simulate the proposed virtualized communication algorithm, under various topologies and configurations to comprehensively evaluate the performance, scalability, and deployment feasibility. The simulation aptly and efficiently evaluates the results for latency, energy, and bandwidth consumption parameters.