Positioning in 5G networks

I have written about the 5G positioning techniques not that long back on this blog here and on connectivity technology blog here. With Release-16 now ready for deployment, Huawei has already announced world's first in 5G Indoor Positioning. Their announcement said:

China Mobile Suzhou and Huawei reached a new milestone with the verification of the 5G indoor positioning capability in metro transport scenarios in Suzhou — a major city located along the southeastern edge of Jiangsu Province in eastern China. The verification showed that, even with pRRUs being hidden, a positioning precision of 3 to 5 m can be achieved in 90% of the platform and hall areas. This is the first time that 5G indoor positioning has been verified on live networks in the world, providing valuable experience for the commercial growth of 5G positioning in vertical industries.

Indoor location-based services are in high demand of vertical applications, such as indoor navigation, asset tracking, geofencing, logistics management, and personnel management, which reflects the huge market space of indoor positioning. Currently, indoor positioning technologies are of great variety and most of them need to be deployed and maintained individually, resulting in high end-to-end costs. As a part of the continuous evolution of 5G, positioning has been added to 3GPP Release 16 finalized in mid 2020 to realize indoor positioning by leveraging the ultra-high signal resolution empowered by 5G's high bandwidth, multi-point measurements, and multi-access edge computing (MEC) deployment.

The verification was based on Huawei's 5G digital indoor solution LampSite and leading MEC solution. The LampSite units measure the radio signals of 5G devices and work with MEC to analyze the signal characteristics. Based on the results of the analysis, leading algorithms are used to precisely locate 5G devices.

We wrote about Huawei's Lampsite on Telecoms Infrastructure blog last year here.

A group of Ericsson engineers have written a research paper on 5G positioning recently. It's available on arXiv here. Here is the abstract:

In this paper we describe the recent 3GPP Release 16 specification for positioning in 5G networks. It specifies positioning signals, measurements, procedures, and architecture to meet requirements from a plethora of regulatory, commercial and industrial use cases. 5G thereby significantly extends positioning capabilities compared to what was possible with LTE. The indicative positioning performance is evaluated in agreed representative 3GPP simulation scenarios, showing a 90 percentile accuracy of a few meters down to a few decimeters depending on scenarios and assumptions.

Definitely worth a read if you like hardcore technical papers.

Related Posts:

• The 3G4G Blog: Positioning Techniques for 5G NR in 3GPP Release-16
• Connectivity Technology Blog: 5G Indoor Precise Positioning
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Huawei 5G Lampsite wins awards and speed tests 

A look at 5G Applications, Application Functions & Application Servers

We often get questions about 5G Service Based Architecture. Luckily, we have a tutorial that we can redirect people to. It's available here and the video just crossed 50K views. One of the questions that people often want to understand, is about the Application Function (AF) and how does it fit in the Applications Architecture.

To explain this, we made a tutorial. The slides and videos are embedded below. In that we have used the examples from our XR, V2X and Private Networks tutorials. All links are available at the bottom of this post.

Video:

Slides:

Intermediate: 5G Applications Architecture - A look at Application Functions & Application Servers from 3G4G

Related Posts:

• 3G4G: 5G Service Based Architecture (SBA)
• The 3G4G Blog: 5G eXtended Reality (5G-XR) in 5G System (5GS)
• The 3G4G Blog: An Introduction to Vehicle to Everything (V2X) and Cellular V2X (C-V2X)
• The 3G4G Blog: 5G Private and Non-Public Network (NPN)
• 3G4G: 3GPP 5G Specifications