“Black Magic 5G Sidelink”: Transparently Extending Short-Range Black-Box Wearable Sensors to a Wide Area via 5G Sidelink

Human motion capture has various use cases such as digital twinning. Most wearable sensing devices to capture data employ short-range wireless protocols such as serial communications over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to satisfy the requirement of low power consumption. On the other hand, the short-range wireless communications limit the applications of human motion capture since digital twinning is often considered more useful in a wide area, e.g., capturing motions of sports players in a large stadium, etc. However, the problem is that replacing BLE with 5G for the existing sensors is not favorable for developers due to the additional cost of re-designing the system, not to mention that it is infeasible for end-users as the sensor protocol is proprietary. In order to overcome this challenge, we propose “black-magic 5G Sidelink” to extend the range of the existing human motion capture sensing system with serial communications via BLE, “transparently” tunneling the black-box sensor protocols over 5G. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose a viable architecture of transparent extension of any existing BLE serial sensor systems to a wide area. Second, we actually implement the proposed system. Third, our evaluation reveals that the captured data from many people can be efficiently acquired with a low latency of about 40 msec over a wide area, and thus shows the feasibility of transparently extending short-range black-box wearable sensors to a wide area via 5G Sidelink by our proposal.