Carrier Phase Ranging for Indoor Positioning With 5G NR Signals

Indoor positioning is one of the core technologies of Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) and is expected to play a significant role in the upcoming era of AI. However, affected by the complexity of indoor environments, it is still highly challenging to achieve continuous and reliable indoor positioning. Currently, 5G cellular networks are being deployed worldwide, the new technologies of which have brought the approaches for improving the performance of wireless indoor positioning. In this article, we investigate the indoor positioning under the 5G new radio (NR), which has been standardized and being commercially operated in massive markets. Specifically, a solution is proposed and a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver is developed for indoor positioning. With our SDR indoor positioning system, the 5G NR signals are first sampled by universal software radio peripheral (USRP), and then, coarse synchronization is achieved via detecting the start of the synchronization signal block (SSB). Then, with the assistance of the pilots transmitted on the physical broadcasting channel (PBCH), multipath acquisition and delay tracking are sequentially carried out to estimate the Time of Arrival (ToA) of received signals. Furthermore, to improve the ToA ranging accuracy, the carrier phase of the first arrived path is estimated. Finally, to quantify the accuracy of our ToA estimation method, indoor field tests are carried out in an office environment, where a 5G NR base station (known as gNB) is installed for commercial use. Our test results show that, in the static test scenarios, the ToA accuracy measured by the 1-sigma error interval is about 0.5 m, while in the pedestrian mobile environment, the probability of range accuracy within 0.8 m is 95%.