Confidentiality-Preserving Edge-Based Wireless Communications for Contact Tracing Systems

Abstract

This paper addresses two issues of a contact-tracing system with edge-based wireless communication techniques: to locate close contacts and to provide confidentiality-preserving communications. In this paper, we propose the Confidentiality-Preserving Contact-Tracing (CPCT) system with multiple wireless edge-based nodes. The CPCT system consists of three stages: registration, authentication, and confidentiality-preserving communication stages. We propose two Physical-Layer Authentication (PLA) schemes for the authentication stage of the CPCT system: the Coordinate-based Location PLA (CLP) scheme using the estimated coordinates and the Time-of-Arrival (ToA) based Location PLA (TLP) scheme using the estimated ToAs. We propose a distributed encryption scheme for the confidentiality-preserving communication stage of the CPCT system named the Distributed Channel Impulse Response (CIR)-based Encryption (DCE) scheme. We provide the theoretical analysis of the proposed schemes and derive their closed-form expressions. We implement the proposed schemes and conduct extensive performance comparisons through simulations. We observe that the theoretical results perfectly match the corresponding simulation results. Moreover, the proposed PLA schemes provide higher authentication performance than the prior PLA scheme, while the proposed encryption scheme provides higher confidentiality performance than the prior encryption scheme.