A Review of Contact Tracing Approaches for Controlling COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The year 2020 will always be in the history of mankind due to the deadly outbreak of COVID-19 Many people are already infected around the world due to the spreading of this novel coronavirus The virus mainly replicates through close contacts so there are no other alternatives than to keep social distance use proper safety gear and maintain self-quarantine As a result the growth of the virus has changed the lifestyle of every individual to a great extent It is also compelling the Governments to dictate strict lock-downs of the highly affected areas impose work-from-home approaches where applicable enforce strict social distancing standards and so on Some of the countries are also using smartphonebased applications for contact tracing to track the possibly infected individuals However there is a lot of discussion around the world about these contact tracing applications and also about their architecture attribute data privacy and so on In this paper we have provided a comprehensive review of these contact tracing approaches in terms of their system architecture key attributes and data privacy We have also outlined a list of potential research directions that can improvise the tracing performance while maintaining the privacy of the user to a great extent