Vehicle Positioning Using 5G Millimeter-Wave Systems

Recent growth in traffic and the resulting congestion and accidents has increased the demand for vehicle positioning systems. Existing global navigation satellite systems were designed for line of sight environments and thus accurately determining the location of a vehicle in urban areas with tall buildings or regions with dense foliage is difficult. Fifth generation (5G) cellular networks provide device-to-device communication capabilities which can be exploited to determine the real-time location of vehicles. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) transmission is regarded as a key technology for 5G networks. This paper examines vehicle positioning using 5G mmWave signals. Both a correlation receiver and an energy detector are considered for timing estimation. Furthermore, fixed and dynamic thresholds for energy detection are examined. It is shown that a correlation receiver can provide excellent ranging accuracy but has high computational complexity, whereas an energy detector has low computational complexity and provides good ranging accuracy. Furthermore, the Gaussian raised-cosine pulse (RCP), Gaussian pulse, and Sinc-RCP impulse radio waveforms provide the best performance.