CNS Core: Small: Seamless Coexistence of Positioning and Communication in 5G and Beyond Wireless Systems

Next generation 5G and beyond wireless systems are rapidly evolving to support positioning as a native feature using their communication infrastructure. Notwithstanding the dependence on a densely deployed infrastructure (for accurate positioning), the overhead of such an infrastructure- based positioning approach can bring significant degradation to communication performance, and warrants timely attention.

The proposed research explores a fundamentally different paradigm of communication-aware collaborative positioning, whereby the burden of positioning is offloaded to client devices in an intelligent, communication-aware and collaborative (peer-peer) manner that reduces overhead and improves spatial reuse to preserve communication performance, without compromising on positioning accuracy. The proposed research will pave the way for future wireless networks that double up as sensing platforms through a seamless coexistence of positioning and communication.

It can impact society in more ways than one, ranging from enabling novel 5G applications that benefit consumers (e.g. immersive applications) and enterprises to more broadly enabling infrastructure-light/free positioning that is central to challenging public-safety and remote orchestration environments. It aims to inform upcoming and future IEEE and 3GPP standards by demonstrating the potential of collaborative positioning and advocating for its accommodation in the standard specifications.

It will also impact the industry that is actively working on positioning through demonstration of its results.

The proposed research aims to take an important step towards this vision by addressing three key challenges: (i) characterizing the tradeoff between communication and positioning performance, and leveraging the paradigm of collaborative positioning to design a seamless and efficient coexistence framework; (ii) realizing coexistence in practice for both asynchronous (WiFi) and synchronous (cellular: LTE and new radio, NR) access systems through scalable, distributed medium access mechanisms; and (iii) enabling and leveraging positioning to go beyond coexistence and optimize communication performance as we move to more challenging high frequency millimeter-Wave systems that are burdened by measurement overhead. Through the design of an analytically-sound coexistence framework along with an integrated (WiFi + LTE/NR) 5G testbed network deployment, we will propose a suite of innovative algorithms and protocols that allow us to not only strike an efficient balance in both communication and positioning performance, but also enhance communication performance in future high frequency wireless systems.

Such a framework will have broader implications beyond positioning and will apply to several other sensing problems under the much-anticipated paradigm of “joint communication and sensing” in our future 6G networks.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.