A Review on Wireless Fidelity Co-Location Technology Adopted Indoors for Technology-Based Contact Tracing

Abstract

As the number of casualties and confirmed cases of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) gradually decreases, several countries across the globe are gradually trying to ease their society to some semblance of normalcy. However, to avoid systems that restrict social interactions in indoor environments, it is necessary to adopt solutions that redefine the ethos of social interactions within indoor environments. To achieve this, technology-based contact tracing (TCT) has been adopted as one of the systems used to mitigate the spread of the outbreak. On this premise, this review discusses co-location technologies suitable for indoor environments, with a specific focus on co-location solutions whose implementation costs are affordable, scalable, and whose access conditions utilize existing infrastructures that are available in off-the-shelf user equipment. This review focuses on wireless fidelity (WiFi) as a co-location technology adopted for TCT. On this premise, the limitations around adoption and recommendations, which highlight improvements, are compactly discussed around WiFi. In this context, a future research direction - on which this review is based - is compactly discussed.