Impact of FR1 5G NR Jammers on UWB Indoor Position Location Systems

Ultra-wide band (UWB) technology has emerged as the most reliable, accurate and precise position location system. Due to the wide bandwidth (>500M) of operation, UWB systems exhibit excellent resilience to out-of-band interference from narrowband jammers such as 2G/3G/4G cellular and WiFi. The newly released FR1 5G NR licensed bands (n77, n78 n79) overlap with the 3.2-5GHz portion of the UWB band and are expected to have operating bandwidth of 100-200MHz to meet the rising demand for high data rates. FR1 5G NR is expected to start rolling out in 2020 and densify and extend to 10GHz over the next decade. The ubiquitous presence of wideband 5G NR signals threatens the operation of UWB position location systems. In this paper, we report the preliminary measurement results of the impact of wideband 5G NR jammers on the achievable range of a commercial DecaWave UWB indoor position location system. The measurements results were compared with theoretical prediction obtained by the Cramer-Rao lower bound.