Opportunistic Positioning with Beamformed 5G Signals

An approach for positioning a stationary receiver using beamformed cellular 5G signals is developed. The proposed approach exploits the time-of-arrival (TOA) and azimuth direction-of-arrival (DOA) of incoming 5G signals. Using a uniform linear array (ULA), beamforming is implemented to improve the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) and reduce the carrier phase and code phase errors. The proposed approach is validated experimentally with received signals from two 5G gNBs, showing that upon beamforming, the CNR increased by around 4 dB. Moreover, before beamforming, the standard deviation of the carrier phase and code phase errors were 6.1 degrees and 0.0843 samples, respectively, which got reduced after beamforming to 4.5 degrees and 0.0545 samples, respectively. Experimental results are presented showing stationary receiver localization with beamformed TOA and azimuth DOA measurements. Starting with an initial estimate 412 m away from the receiver’s true position, the receiver was localized with a final two-dimensional error of 8.52 m with two 5G gNBs.