CoronaZ: another distributed systems project

TL;DR

CoronaZ is a distributed systems project that simulates contact tracing using nodes representing people or devices, communicating via publish-subscribe pattern, with a web interface for data visualization.

Contribution

It demonstrates a contact tracing simulation using distributed nodes and publish-subscribe communication, with open-source code and a web interface for data display.

Findings

Successfully implemented a distributed contact tracing simulation

Demonstrated data collection and visualization via web interface

Showed feasibility of using pub-sub pattern in such applications

Abstract

This brief paper describes CoronaZ, a project for the Distributed Systems course at the University of Helsinki. All the code of the project is publicly available on GitHub repository. This project simulates a contact tracing application where each node represents a person (or a unique device attached to someone) that send signals to each other when in range and communicate the data collected to a server using the publish-subscribe pattern. The server, called broker, can then be polled by a node called consumer that will send the data to a database. A front-end application then requests this data and displays the movement and the latest updates via the browser. The idea came from simulating this kind of movements with Arduino boards capable of communicating between themselves using the nrf24l01 and to the broker with esp8266. Unfortunately this was not possible given the relatively strict amount of time that each of the students involved could dedicate to the project and the waiting time to get the necessary hardware.