5G will open new possibilities in positioning
Positioning technology utilizing cellular and WLAN systems is not new. It has been widely used over the last two decades to complement global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), especially in the areas where GNSS coverage is not available such as indoors or dense urban areas. However, the accuracy provided by wireless positioning hasn’t kept pace with advanced GNSS methods. Regulatory use cases require accuracies on the order of tens of meters for cellular positioning. While this meets some basic location needs today, like emergency call location, that level of accuracy certainly won’t support what we see is coming down the road in 5G.
Many of the most promising future use cases for positioning using 5G New Radio (NR) are centered around asset tracking. We already have deployed low-cost asset tracking devices (or tags) and can determine their position using 5G NR. For example, in connected digital mining, autonomous mining vehicles or drills can be monitored and controlled from a central location. This can be useful to monitor their speed and location, and to optimize the lifecycle of mining machines. These systems can take measurements at the asset tag or in the network using 5G signals.
While remote mining is one such application of asset tracking, there are many others such as logistics (tracking packages or goods), autonomous farming (ground-based farming robots), and campus geo-fencing (trigging an alarm if a device leaves a certain area). Asset tracking is expected to apply to both outdoor and hybrid of indoor and outdoor use cases in which large geographic areas need to be covered but latency requirements may not always be stringent.
The industrial internet of things (IIoT) has also motivated development in 5G NR-based positioning. Like asset tracking, many IIoT-positioning use cases involve machines or robots that need to be tracked or controlled as they move about on an indoor factory floor. 5G NR is an exciting solution for these use cases thanks to its high data rates and ultra-reliable connections. What’s more, many IIoT-positioning use cases require low latency in addition to high accuracy. These types of machines and devices are expected to have more positioning processing capabilities and features as opposed to the very low-cost devices described above.
Very high positioning accuracies of 10 centimeters or less and latencies on the order of 10 milliseconds would likely be needed for these types of applications – clearly much more stringent than the positioning requirements for 4G LTE networks, which typically provide accuracies of 100 meters and latencies of up to 30 seconds. 5G NR-based positioning can deliver the higher accuracies, lower latency and ultra-high reliability needed for various scenarios.
What is driving the large improvement in positioning performance from 4G LTE to 5G NR? 3GPP introduced in NR Release-16 a baseline set of positioning techniques based on timing, angle and power measurements that take advantage of key features of 5G networks: wide bandwidth, massive MIMO and dense infrastructure. This baseline set of positioning techniques is being further enhanced and optimized in 3GPP NR Release-17. Those enhancements will likely include line-of-sight identification, the use of carrier aggregation for positioning signals, positioning for devices without active data sessions (to improve efficiency) and changes to the protocols that optimize latency.
Looking beyond Release-17 in 5G and even toward 6G, further positioning enhancements will allow the network to sense user orientation, add sidelink device-to-device positioning support and boost achievable positioning accuracy through new technologies like carrier phase positioning. The positioning solutions introduced in Release-16, and enhanced in Release-17, will serve as the baseline for continued evolution to meet an increasingly diverse set of use cases, which we discuss in our recent whitepaper: The evolution of 5G new Radio Positioning Technologies.
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