Elizaveta Rastorgueva-Foi, Olga Galinina, Mário Costa, Mike Koivisto, Jukka Talvitie, Sergey Andreev, and Mikko Valkama
It has become apparent that highly directional millimeter-wave (mmW) connectivity – especially in industry- grade scenarios with complex and unpredictable device mobility – requires a certain degree of structural redundancy in the network, which can be provided by utilizing multi-connectivity mechanisms. To lower the coordination complexity and overhead of tracking multiple directional beams, mmW networks can retrieve and leverage timely positioning information. In this paper, we develop a holistic framework for the co-design of networking and positioning in industrial 5G mmW deployments with multi-connectivity capabilities. In particular, we propose a flexible two- stage positioning solution – mindful of information uncertainty – that relies upon the 5G NR system design and can be seamlessly integrated into the mmW cellular infrastructure with reasonable overheads. We reproduce a typical 5G mmW network deployment featuring dissimilar device mobility patterns and assess the performance of the proposed architecture. In particular, we evaluate the precision of our positioning and base station orientation estimation methods as well as analyze the impact of the proposed scheme on the system-level performance. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed solution yields highly accurate position estimates and significantly improves the average network spectral efficiency.
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
Videos and Demonstrations
Joint 3D device positioning and base station (BS) orientation uncertainty estimation using an extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based framework in a realistic port scenario
In this demonstration, three user devices representing automated guided vehicles are moving in an open area in a realistic port environment. In the proposed framework, base stations (BSs) with 3-degree orientation uncertainties are first transmitting reference signals in a downlink through a set of fixed beams, after which the signals are received by the user devices in a beam-sweep process. Based on the considered beam-selection criterion, each device communicates the most significant beam reference signal received powers (BRSRPs) and the corresponding beam-indices back to the BS. Building on the proposed two-stage EKF-based estimation and tracking solution, these BRSRPs from all available BSs are fused into direction-of-departure (DoD) measurements, which are then used as measurements in joint device positioning and BS orientation uncertainty estimation.