Scalable Wide-Area Wearable Sensing via BLE-over-5G Tunneling and GNSS Integration

In the coming Cyber-Physical System (CPS) society, the convergence of the cyber and physical worlds will enable cross-domain data analysis to improve the real world. Among the various types of data, human motion data are indispensable for realizing human-centered CPS loops. Though the value of the data increases when collected simultaneously across a wide area and in large quantities, the wearable sensors to capture the data are often implemented with short-range communication standards. This causes the following issues: distance scalability, multi-device scalability, and accuracy of reproduced global coordinates. However, redeveloping sensors to solve the three issues above is not practical because the specifications are a black box for end users and are costly for developers. To deal with these problems, we propose an architecture to transparently tunnel the black-box sensor protocols over 5G and to integrate motion data and high-precision position information in the same 5G network. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed architecture is effective for all the issues through hardware system evaluations and simulation evaluations. In particular, the implemented system provides stable communication characteristics regardless of distance up to at least 105 m, and the simulation shows that the average one-way delay including retransmission delays remains low at 13.93 msec even under multiple simultaneous connections.