Design and Evaluation of a Precise Positioning System using 5G Sidelink for Automotive Use Cases

The objective of this paper is to examine the latest positioning techniques in the 5G mobile communication standard, with a particular focus on their potential applications in autonomous vehicles. This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of the performance of the Positioning Reference Signal (PRS) with a carrier frequency of 5.9GHz (FR1) for determining the distance between two 5G devices without the involvement of a base station (5G Sidelink). It compares three different methods for calculating distances from raw data, employing both time-domain and frequency-domain calculations. The impact of diverse signal parameters on the precision of distance estimation is investigated through simulation. In contrast to previous research, the performance of the signal was investigated using real-world measurements. It can be shown that the PRS, with the correct evaluation method and signal configuration, meets the positioning accuracy of autonomous cars with RMSE ≤ 0.5m in real-world measurement scenarios.