Performance trade-off for integrated communication and data-assisted positioning in MIMO-OFDM system

Communication and positioning, the two pillars of mobile communication systems, are currently being integrated together. The development of communication technologies is the driving force of the positioning progress. In turn, the location information provided by positioning improves the communication performance in various ways. However, the competition of these two functions in terms of resource allocation is a critical issue hindering their integration. In this article, we investigate the trade-off for the integrated communication and data-assisted positioning in multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. A data-assisted positioning method is designed first, which uses both positioning reference signals (PRSs) and data signals for positioning. The positioning and communication performance are theoretically evaluated respectively, then combined to obtain an integrated performance metric. The trade-off is analyzed and the integrated performance is optimized considering the priority of different functions. Numerical simulations show that the data-assisted positioning can not only improve the positioning accuracy, but also reduce the PRS overhead. And the established integrated performance metric can identify the optimal performance and the corresponding resource allocation schemes.