Receiver Design and Time of Arrival Estimation for Opportunistic Localization With 5G Signals

A comprehensive approach for opportunistic navigation with fifth-generation (5G) cellular signals that exploits the downlink channel is developed. The structure of possible 5G reference signals that can be exploited is presented. Then, a software-defined receiver (SDR) to extract navigation observables from cellular 5G signals is proposed. The statistics of the code phase error in a multipath-free environment and in the presence of multipath are derived, which are subsequently used to analyze the statistics of the position estimation error with different simulated channel models. Finally, experimental results are conducted to evaluate the ranging performance of the proposed SDR with real 5G signals. After removing the effect of the clock bias and drift from the estimated pseudorange, the ranging error standard deviation is shown to be 1.19 m.