A Fisher Information Analysis of Joint Localization and Synchronization in near Field

In 5G communication, arrays are used for both positioning and communication. As the arrays become larger, the far-field assumption is increasingly being violated and curvature of the wavefront should be taken into account. In this paper, we use a single large linear array and relative phase measurements to perform the localization and synchronization. We explicitly contrast near-field and far-field uplink localization performance in the presence of a clock bias from a Fisher information perspective and show how a simple algorithm can provide a coarse estimate of a user's location and clock bias.