Millimeter-Wave Downlink Positioning With a Single-Antenna Receiver

This paper addresses the problem of determining the unknown position of a mobile station for a mmWave multiple-input single-output (MISO) system. This setup is motivated by the fact that massive arrays will be initially implemented only on 5G base stations, likely leaving mobile stations with one antenna. The maximum likelihood solution to this problem is devised based on the time of flight and angle of departure of received downlink signals. While positioning in the uplink would rely on angle of arrival, it presents scalability limitations that are avoided in the downlink. To circumvent the multidimensional optimization of the optimal joint estimator, we propose two novel approaches amenable to practical implementation thanks to their reduced complexity. A thorough analysis, which includes the derivation of relevant Cramér-Rao lower bounds, shows that it is possible to achieve quasi-optimal performance even in presence of few transmissions, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNRs), and multipath propagation effects.