A Global Contact Tracing Application for Viral Outbreak: Architecture, Design, and Deployment Challenges

A contact tracing application can remedy the rapid infection spike to minimize the massive spread of infectious viruses during an outbreak. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many contact tracing applications based on QR codes, Global Positioning System (GPS), and Bluetooth technologies were launched that helped control the virus's spread. This paper reviews the underlying architecture of those contact tracing applications and presents a global contact tracing application framework for future use. The proposed architecture follows the Bluetooth-based decentralized framework that promises the end-user higher data privacy and security.