Performance Evaluation of 5G-NR Positioning Accuracy Using Time Difference of Arrival Method

In this paper we evaluate the performance of fifth generation new radio (5G NR) based positioning under realistic conditions model for cooperative connected automated mobility (CCAM) scenarios. We benchmark the performance using 3GPP release 16 proposed new positioning reference signal (PRS), of positioning in 5G NR mobile networks. Time difference of arrival (TDoA) positioning methods is one of the widely used method which is used for localization. Simulation results are showing that under line-of-sight (LOS) conditions, the desired positioning accuracy is achievable for various CCAM use-cases. In best case scenarios precision is less than 1m in 80% of cases. In more realistic cases, when there is no line of sight (NLOS) between user terminal (UT) and network nodes, then accuracy decreases significantly. Methods of automatic classification of LOS/NLOS channels are thus needed. TDoA positioning method suffers degradation of performance, when different network nodes are out of sync with each other. Thus, other methods, less sensitive to synchronization error, such as round-trip time (RTT) or angle-based measurements might be worth considering.