Vehicular Networks for Combating a Worldwide Pandemic: Preventing the Spread of COVID-19

TL;DR

This paper explores how vehicular networks can be utilized to combat COVID-19 by supporting applications like social distancing, diagnosis, and border control, emphasizing data privacy, resource management, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides an extensive discussion on vehicular networking applications for pandemic control, highlighting unique data characteristics and proposing future research avenues.

Findings

Vehicular networks can support COVID-19 mitigation applications.

Data privacy and resource allocation are critical in vehicular pandemic responses.

Future directions include privacy preservation, data caching, and routing improvements.

Abstract

As a worldwide pandemic, the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) has caused serious restrictions in people's social life, along with the loss of lives, the collapse of economies and the disruption of humanitarian aids. Despite the advance of technological developments, we, as researchers, have witnessed that several issues need further investigation for a better response to a pandemic outbreak. Therefore, researchers recently started developing ideas to stop or at least reduce the spread of the pandemic. While there have been some prior works on wireless networks for combating a pandemic scenario, vehicular networks and their potential bottlenecks have not yet been fully examined. Furthermore, the vehicular scenarios can be identified as the locations, where the social distancing is mostly violated. With this motivation, this article provides an extensive discussion on vehicular networking for combating a pandemic. We provide the major applications of vehicular networking for combating COVID-19 in public transportation, in-vehicle diagnosis, border patrol and social distance monitoring. Next, we identify the unique characteristics of the collected data in terms of privacy, flexibility and coverage, then highlight corresponding future directions in privacy preservation, resource allocation, data caching and data routing. We believe that this work paves the way for the development of new products and algorithms that can facilitate the social life and help controlling the spread of the pandemic.