Overview of Positioning in 5G New Radio

Abstract

Accurate and real time location knowledge is an important requirement for various new services like e.g. emergency services, vehicular related use cases and factories of the future. 3GPP Rel-16 will specify positioning support for 5G New Radio (NR). A study item was concluded in March 2019 to investigate positioning support for NR Rel-16 and a follow up work item is in progress to specify positioning support for Rel-16. Several positioning solutions will be supported in 5G NR. The operation in higher carrier frequencies and utilization of massive antenna arrays provides additional degrees of freedom to improve the positioning accuracy compared to LTE. Rel-16 positioning is targeting to <; 3 meters positioning accuracy for some use cases. Next 3GPP Releases are expected to further specify methods for sub-meter accuracy and low latency. In this work an overview of the positioning work within 3GPP is given, highlighting both architectural and physical layer aspects.