Positioning and Tracking in DECT-2020 NR With Proactive Anchor Selection for Range, Angle, and RSS Measurements

This article addresses efficient positioning and user device tracking in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks with particular focus on the new DECT-2020 New Radio standard—the first noncellular 5G technology standard in the world. Stemming from fundamental performance requirements of IoT networks, for example, related to energy consumption, latency, and reliability, it is important to utilize available radio resources efficiently, while avoiding redundant transmissions and signaling. In this article, we extend our earlier proposed tracking-based positioning solution, which utilized Fisher information to select the most beneficial range and angle measurements, to cover also received signal strength (RSS)-based measurements and particle filter-based solutions. By exploiting prior information inherited from tracking-based positioning solutions, it is possible to proactively select the most valuable positioning measurements, and thus save valuable effort and time in acquiring and processing positioning measurements without sacrificing the positioning performance in practice. Through extensive numerical evaluations, considering range, angle, and RSS measurements, we show that the proposed anchor selection method is able to outperform the traditional signal-to-noise ratio-based measurement selection approach, while enabling positioning with a smaller number of measurements. In addition, we illustrate the effect of prior information quality on the proposed method performance by varying the measurement interval in the tracking process. The numerical results show that when only two anchors are utilized, approximately up to 10%–50% reduction in positioning root-mean-square error can be achieved depending on the considered measurement type.