Enabling Low-Power High-Accuracy Positioning (LPHAP) in 3GPP NR Standards

3GPP is paving the way to enhance the 5G NR positioning for general use cases as well as vertical industry scenarios, which attracts wide research from industry and academy. Among the varied requirements the most important one is to reduce the power consumption of the positioning device while keeping high accuracy in order to dominate the increasing market of positioning. In this paper, we propose a LPHAP solution under the 3GPP NR standard framework. For reduced power consumption, a new category or capability for positioning device is defined where RRC_INACTIVE state positioning with user-centric positioning area. For accuracy enhancement, we propose to improve TOA measurement by stitching the SRSs in multiple bands and analyze the Cramer-Rao Bound of TOA estimation. Uplink time difference of arrival (UL-TDOA) with expected angle-of-arrival is investigated to enhance TDOA measurements. Performance evaluations show that the device can reach the accuracy of 0.3m @90 % and the device battery life can be extended 20 times compared to Rel-17 UE.